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THE TORCH 

AND OTHER LECTURES AND 
ADDRESSES 



BY 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 



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NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1920 



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COPYRIGHT, 1905, 1910, 1916, BY 
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 



•NOV 12 1320 



©CI,A604070 



CONTENTS 

THE TORCH 

Man and the Race, 3 

The Language of all the World, 25 

The Titan Myth (I), 43 

The Titan Myth (H), 63 

Spenser, 83 

Milton, 103 

Wordsworth, 121 

Shelley, 143 

THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Poetic Madness, 165 
Marlowe, 183 
Camoens, 202 
Byron, 221 
Gray, 241 
Tasso, 261 
Lucretius, 281 
Inspiration, 301 

THE POE CENTENARY, 323 "^ 

SHAKESPEARE, 329 

THE SALEM ATHEN.EUM, 351 



THE TORCH 



Eight lectures on Race Power in Litera- 
ture, delivered before the Lowell Institute 
of Boston, 1903 



AUGESCUNT ALIAE GENTES, ALIAE MINITTTNTUR, 
INQUE BREVI SPATIO MUTANTUR SAECLA ANIMANTUM 
ET QUASI CURSORES VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT 



MAN AND THE RACE 

It belongs to a highly developed race to become, in a 
true sense, aristocratic — a treasury of its best in practi- 
cal and spiritual types, and then to disappear in the sur- 
rounding tides of men. So Athens dissolved like a pearl 
in the cup of the Mediterranean, and Rome in the cup 
of Europe, and Judaea in the cup of the Universal Com- 
munion. Though death is the law of all life, man touches 
this earthen fact with the wand of the spirit, and trans- 
forms it into the law of sacrifice. Man has won no vic- 
tory over his environment so sublime as this, finding in 
his mortal sentence the true choice of the soul and in the 
road out of Paradise the open highway of eternal life. 
Races die; but the ideal of sacrifice as the highest race- 
destiny has seldom occurred to men, though it has been 
suggested both by devout Jews and by devout Irishmen 
as the divinely appointed organic law of the Hebrew 
and the Celt. In the general view of men the extinction 
of a race partakes of the unreasoning finality of 
nature. 

The vital flow of life has this in common with disease 
— that it is self-limited; the fever runs its course, and 
burns away. "All thoughts, all passions, all delights," 
have this history. In the large arcs of social being, move- 
ments of the human spirit, however embracing and pro- 
found, obey the same law of the limitation of specific 
energy. Revolutions, reforms, re-births exhaust their 

3 



4 THE TORCH 

fuel, and go out. Races are only greater units of man; 
for a race, as for an individual, there is a time to die; and 
that time, as history discloses it, is the moment of per- 
fection. This is the largest fact in the moral order of the 
world; it is the center of providence in history. In the 
life of the human spirit the death of the best of its 
achieving elements, in the moment of their consumma- 
tion, is as the fading of the flower of the field or the 
annual fall of the leaves of the forest in the natural world ; 
and unless this be a sacrificial death, it were wantonness 
and waste like the deaths of nature; but man and his 
works are supernatural, and raised above nature by an 
imperishable relation which they contain. Race-history 
is a perpetual celebration of the Mass. The Cross ini- 
tials every page with its broad gold, and he whose eye 
misses that letter has lost the clue to the meaning. I 
do not refer to the self-devotion of individuals, the 
sacred lives of the race. I speak of the involuntary 
element in the life of nations, or what seems such on 
the vast scale of social life. Always some great culture 
is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civi- 
lization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more 
beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower 
and barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure- 
house. Although no race may consciously devote itself 
to the higher ends of mankind, it is the prerogative of 
its men of genius so to devote it; nor is any nation truly 
great which is not so dedicated by its warriors and 
statesmen, its saints and heroes, its thinkers and 
dreamers. A nation's poets are its true owners; and 
by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of 
its real possessions to strangers and aliens. 

This dedication of the energy of a race by its men 



MAN AND THE RACE 5 

of genius to the higher ends of mankind is the sap of 
all the world. The spiritual life of mankind spreads, the 
spiritual unity of mankind grows, by this age-long sur- 
render of privilege and power into the hands of the 
world's new men, and the leavening of the mass by the 
best that has anywhere arisen in it, which is thus brought 
about. The absorption of aristocracies in democracies, 
the dissolution of the nobler product in inferior en- 
vironments, the salutary death of cultures, civilizations, 
breeds of men, is the strict line on which history, draw- 
ing the sundered parts of the earth slowly together, 
moves to that great consummation when the best that 
has at any time been in the world shall be the portion 
of every man born into it. If the old English blood, 
which here on this soil gave birth to a nation, spread 
civilization through it, and cast the orbit of its starry 
course in time, is destined to be thus absorbed and lost 
in the nation which it has formed, we should be proud 
and happy in such a fate; for this is to wear the seal of 
God's election in history. Nay, if the aristocracy of the 
whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored 
races of the earth, I for one should only rejoice in such 
a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for 
it would mean the humanization of mankind. 

Unless this principle is strongly grasped, unless there 
be an imperishable relation in man and his works which 
they contain, and which, though it has other phases, here 
appears in this eternal salvage stored up in a slowly per- 
fecting race, history through its length and breadth is 
a spectacle to appall and terrify the reason. The per- 
petual flux of time — 

"Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes 
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" — 



6 THE TORCH 

is a mere catastrophe of blood and error unless its mighty 
subverting and dismaying changes are related to some- 
thing which does not pass away with dethroned gods, 
abandoned empires and repealed codes of law and morals. 
But in the extinction of religions, in imperial revolu- 
tions, in the bloody conflict of ideas, there is one thing 
found stable; it is the mind itself, growing through ages. 
That which in its continuity we call the human spirit, 
abides. Men, tribes, states disappear, but the race-mind 
endures. A conception of the world and an emotional 
response thereto constitute the life of the race-mind, and 
fill its consciousness with ideas and feelings, but in these 
there is no element of chance, contingency or frailty; 
they are master-ideas, master-emotions, clothed with 
the power of a long reign over men, and imposing them- 
selves upon each new generation almost with the yoke 
of necessity. What I designated as the race-mind — 
the sole thing permanent in history — is this potential- 
ity of thought and feeling, in any age, realizing itself 
in states of mind and habits of action long established 
in the race, deeply inherited, and slowly modified. The 
race-mind is the epitome of the past. It contains all 
human energy, knowledge, experience, that survives. It 
is the resultant of millions of lives whose earthly power 
it stores in one deathless force. 

This race-mind is simply formed. Life presents cer- 
tain permanent aspects in the environment, which gen- 
erates ways of behavior thereto, normal and general 
among men. The world is a multiplicity, a harvest- 
field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human 
contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of 
tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tac- 
tics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individ- 



MAN AND THE RACE 7 

uals as habits of life. The craftsman has the mind of 
his craft. Life also presents certain other permanent 
internal aptitudes in the soul, whence arises the mind of 
the artist, the inventor, the poet. But this cast of mind 
of the mathematician or of the painter is rather a phase 
of individual life. In the larger unit of the race, en- 
vironment and aptitude, working together in the historic 
life of ages, develop ideas, moods and energies character- 
istic of the race in which they occur. In the sphere of 
ideas, freedom is indissolubly linked with the English, 
righteousness with the Hebrew; in the temperamental 
sphere, a signal instance is the Celtic genius — mystery, 
twilight, supernatural fantasy, lamentation, tragic dis- 
aster; or the Greek genius — definiteness, proportioned 
beauty, ordered science, philosophic principle; and, in 
the sphere of energy, land and gold hunger, and that 
strange soul-hunger — hunger to possess the souls of 
men — which is at the root of all propagandism, have 
been motive powers in many races. 

Thus, in one part or another of time and place, and 
from causes within and without, the race, coming to its 
best, flowers in some creative hope, ripens in some shap- 
ing thought, glows in some resistless enthusiasm. Each 
of these in its own time holds an age in its grasp. They 
seize on men and shape them in multitudes to their will, 
as the wind drives the locusts; make men hideous ascet- 
ics, send them on forlorn voyages, devote them to the 
block and the stake, make Argonauts, Crusaders, Lol- 
lards of them, fill Europe in one age with a riot of 
revolution and in the next with the camps of tyrannic 
power. These ideas, moods, energies have mysterious 
potency; they seem to possess an independent being; 
though, like all the phenomena of life-energy they are 



8 THE TORCH 

self -limited, the period of their growth, culmination and 
decline extends through generations and centuries; they 
seem less the brood of man's mind than higher powers 
that feed on men. They are surrounded by a cloud 
of witnesses — fanatics, martyrs, dupes; they doom 
whole peoples to glory or shame; in the undying battle 
of the soul they are the choosers of the slain. Though 
they proceed from the human spirit, they rule it; and 
in life they are the spiritual presences which are most 
closely unveiled to the apprehension, devotion and love 
of men. 

The race-mind building itself from immemorial time 
out of this mystery of thought and passion, as genera- 
tion after generation kneels and fights and fades, takes 
unerringly the best that anywhere comes to be in the 
world, holds to it with the cling of fate, and lets all else 
fall to oblivion; out of this best it has made, and still 
fashions, that enduring world of idea and emotion into 
which we are born as truly as into the natural world. 
It has a marvelous economy. 

"One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost." 

Egypt, India, Greece and Rome, Italy, the English, 
France, America, the Turk, the Persian, the Russian, 
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Negro feed its pure tra- 
dition of what excellence is possible to the race-mind, 
and has grown habitual in its being; and, as in the old 
myth, it destroys its parent, abolishing all these differ- 
ences of climate, epoch and skull. The race-mind uni- 
fies the race which it preserves; that is its irresistible 
line of advance. It wipes out the barriers of time, 
language and country. It undoes the mischief of Babel, 



MAN AND THE RACE 9 

and restores to mankind one tongue in which all things 
can be understood by all men. It fuses the Bibles of 
all nations in one wisdom and one practice. It knocks 
off the tribal fetters of caste and creed; and, substitut- 
ing thought for blood as the bond of the world, it slowly 
liberates that free soul, which is one in all men and com- 
mon to all mankind. To free the soul in the individual 
life, and to accomplish the unity of mankind — that is 
its work. 

To share in this work is the peculiar and characteris- 
tic office of literature. This fusion of the nations of 
the earth, this substitution of the thought-tie for the 
blood-tie, this enfranchisement of the soul, is its chief 
function; for literature is the organ of the race-mind. 
That is why literature is immortal. Though man's in- 
heritance is bequeathed in many ways — the size and 
shape of the skull, the physical predisposition of the 
body, oral tradition, monumental and artistic works, 
institutions — civilization ever depends in an increasing 
degree upon literature both for expression and tradition; 
and whatever other forms the race-mind may mold itself 
into, literature is its most universal and comprehensive 
form. That is why literature is the great conservator of 
society. It shares in the life of the race-mind, partakes 
of its nature, as language does of thought, corresponds 
to it accurately, duplicates it, is its other-self. It is 
through literature mainly that we know the race-mind, 
and come to possess it; for though the term may seem 
abstract, the thing is real. Men of genius are great in 
proportion as they share in it, and national literatures 
are great in proportion as they embody and express it. 
Brunetiere, the present critic of France, has recently an- 
nounced a new literary formula. He declares that there 



10 THE TORCH 

is a European literature, not the combined group of na- 
tional literatures, but a single literature common to 
European civilization, and that national literatures in 
their periods of culmination, are great in proportion as 
they coincide for the time being with this common litera- 
ture, feed it, and, one after another taking the lead, 
create it. The declaration is a gleam of self-conscious- 
ness in the unity of Europe. How slowly the parts of a 
nation recognize the integrity of their territory and the 
community of their interests is one of the constant les- 
sons of history; the Greek confederation, the work of 
Alfred or of Bismarck, our own experience in the Revo- 
lutionary period illustrate it; so the unity of Europe is 
still half-obscure and dark, though Catholicism, the Re- 
naissance, the Reformation, the Revolution in turn 
flashed this unity forth, struggling to realize itself in 
the common civilization. The literature of Europe is 
the expression of this common genius — the best that 
man has dreamed or thought or done, has found or been 
in Europe — now more briUiant in one capital, now in 
another as the life ebbs from state to state, and is re- 
newed; for, though it fail here or there, it never ceases. 
This is the burning of the race-mind, now bright along the 
Seine, the Rhine and the Thames, as once by the Ganges 
and the Tiber. The true unity of literature, however, 
does not lie in the literature of Europe or of India or of 
antiquity, or in any one manifestation, but in that world- 
literature which is the organ of the race-mind in its 
entire breadth and wholeness. The new French formula 
is a brilliant application, novel, striking and arresting, 
of the old and familiar idea that civilization in its evo- 
lution in history is a single process, continuous, advanc- 
ing and integral, of which nations and ages are only the 



MAN AND THE RACE ii 

successive phases. The life of the spirit in mankind is 
one and universal, burns with the same fires, moves to 
the same issues, joins in a single history; it is the race- 
mind realizing itself cumulatively in time, and mainly 
through the inheriting power of great literature. 

I have developed this conception of the race-mind at 
some length because it is a primary idea. The nature of 
literature, and the perspective and interaction of partic- 
ular literatures, are best comprehended in its light. I 
emphasize it. The world-literature, national literatures, 
individual men of genius, are what they are by virtue 
of sharing in the race-mind, appropriating it and identi- 
fying themselves with it; and what is true of them, 
on the great scale and in a high degree, is true also of 
every man who is born into the world. A man is a man 
by participating in the race-mind. Education is merely 
the process by which he enters it, avails himself of it, 
absorbs it. In the things of material civilization this 
is plain. All the callings of men, arts, crafts, trades, 
sciences, professions, the entire round of practical life, 
have a body of knowledge and method of work which 
are like gospel and ritual to them; apprentice, journey- 
man and master are the stages of their career; and if 
anything be added, from life to life, it is on a basis of 
ascertained fact, of orthodox doctrine and fixed practice. 
I suppose technical education is most uniform, and by 
definiteness of aim and economy of method is most effi- 
cient; and in the professions as well as in the arts and 
crafts competition places so high a premium on knowl- 
edge and skill that the mastery of all the past can teach 
is compulsory in a high degree. Similarly, in society, 
the material unities such as those which commerce, 
manufacturing, banking establish and spread, are soon- 



12 THE TORCH 

est evident and most readily accepted; so true is this 
that, the peace of the world is rather a matter of finance 
than of Christianity. These practical activities and the 
interests that spring out of them lie in the sphere of 
material civilization; but the race-mind, positive, endur- 
ing and beneficent as it is in that sphere, is there par- 
celed out and individualized, and gives a particular and 
almost private character to man and classes of men, and 
it seeks a material good. There is another and spiritual 
sphere in which the soul which is one and the same in 
all men comes to self-knowledge, has its training, and 
achieves its mastery of the world. Essential, universal 
manhood is found only here; for it is here that the race- 
mind, by participation in which a man is a man, en- 
franchises the soul and gives to it the citizenship of the 
world. Education in the things of the spirit is often 
vague in aim and may seem wasteful in method, and 
it is not supported by the thrust and impetus of physi- 
cal need and worldly hope; but it exists in all men in 
some measure, for no one born in our civilization is 
left so savage, no savage born in the wild is left so 
primitive but that he holds a mental attitude, however 
obscure, toward nature, man and God, and has some 
discipline, however initial, in beauty, love and religion. 
These things lie in the sphere of this soul. It is, never- 
theless, true that the greatest inequalities of condition 
exist here, and not in that part of life where good is 
measured by the things of fortune. The difference be- 
tween the outcast and the millionaire is as nothing to 
that between the saint and the criminal, the fool and 
the knower, the boor and the poet. It is a blessing 
in our civilization, and one worthy of the hand of Provi- 
dence, that if in material things justice be a laggard and 



MAN AND THE RACE 13 

disparities of condition be hard to remedy, the roads to 
church and school are public highways, free to all. 
This charter of free education in the life of the soul, 
which is the supreme opportunity of an American life, 
is an open door to the treasury of man's spirit. There 
whosoever will shall open the book of all the world, 
and read and ponder, and shall enter the common mind 
of man which is there contained and avail of its wisdom 
and absorb its energies into his own and become one 
with it in insight, power and hope, and ere he is aware 
shall find himself mingling with the wisest, the holiest, 
the loveliest, as their comrade and peer. He shall have 
poet and sage to sup with him, and their meal shall be 
the bread of life. 

What, then, is the position of the youth — of any 
man whose infinite life lies before him — at his entrance 
on this education, on this attempt to become one with 
the mind of the race? and, to neglect the material side 
of life, what is the process by which he begins to live 
in the spirit, and not as one new-born, but even in his 
youth sharing in the wisdom and disciplined power of 
a soul that has lived through all human ages — the soul 
of mankind? We forget the beginnings of life; we for- 
get first sensation, first action, and the unknown magic 
by which, as the nautilus builds its shell, we built out of 
these early elements this world of the impalpable blue 
walls, the ocean and prairie floors, and star-sown space, 
each one of us for ourselves. There is a thought, which 
1 suppose is a commonplace and may be half-trivial, 
but it is one that took hold of me in boyhood with great 
tenacity, and stirred the sense of strangeness and marvel 
in life; the idea that all I knew or should ever know was 
through something that had touched my body. The 



14 THE TORCH 

ether-wave envelops us as the ocean, and in that small 
surface of contact is the sphere of sensibility — of light, 
sound, and the rest — out of which arises the world 
which each one of us perceives. It seems a fantastic 
conception, but it is a true one. For me the idea 
seemed to shrink the world to the dark envelope of my 
own body. It served, however, to initiate me in the 
broader conception that the soul is the center, and that 
life — the world — radiates from it into the enclosing 
infinite. Wordsworth, you remember, in his famous 
image of our infancy presents the matter differently; 
for him the infant began with the infinite, and boy and 
man lived in an ever narrowing world, a contracting 
prison, like that fabled one of the Inquisition, and in 
the end life became a thing common and finite: 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 
He sees it in his joy: 

At length the man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

This was never my own conception, nor do I think it is 
natural to many men. On the contrary, life is an expan- 
sion. The sense of the larger world comes first, per- 
haps, in those unremembered years when the sky ceases 
to be an inverted bowl, and lifts off from the earth. The 
experience is fixed for me by another half-childish 
memory, the familiar verses of Tom Hood in which he 
describes his early home. You will recall the almost 
nursery rhymes: 



MAN AND THE RACE 15 

"I remember, I remember 

The fir-trees dark and high; 
I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky ; 
It was a childish ignorance, 

But now 't is little joy- 
To know I'm farther off from Heaven 

Than when I was a boy.'* 

Sentiment in the place of philosophy, the thought is the 
same as Wordsworth's, but the image is natural and 
true. The noblest image, however, that sets forth the 
spread of the world, is in that famous sonnet by an ob- 
scure poet, Blanco White, describing the first time that 
the sun went down in Paradise: 

"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame. 

This glorious canopy of light and blue? 

Yet, 'neath the curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came. 

And lo! creation widened in man's view." 

The theory of Copernicus and the voyage of Columbus 
are the great historical moments of such change in the 
thoughts of men. As travel thus discloses the amplitude 
of the planet and science fills the infinite of space for the 
learning mind, history in its turn peoples the "dark 
background and abysm of time." But more marvelous 
than the unveiling of time and space, is that last revela- 
tion which unlocks the inward world of idea and emotion, 
and gives solidity to life as by a third dimension. It is 
this world which is the realm of imaginative literature; 
scarcely by any other interpreter shall a man come into 
knowledge of it with any adequacy; and here the sub- 



i6 THE TORCH 

ject draws to a head, for it is by the operation of litera- 
ture in this regard that the race-mind takes possession 
of the world. 

We are plunged at birth in medias res, as the phrase 
is, into the midst of things — into a world already old, of 
old ideas, old feelings, old experience, that has drunk 
to the lees the wisdom of the teacher of Ecclesiastes, 
and renews in millions of lives the life that has been 
lived a million times; a world of custom and usage, of 
immemorial habits, of causes prejudged, of insoluble 
problems, of philosophies and orthodoxies and things 
established; and yet, too, a world of the undiscovered. 
The youth awakes in this world, intellectually, in litera- 
ture; and since the literature of the last age is that on 
which the new generation is formed, he now first comes 
in contact with the large life of mankind in the litera- 
ture of the last century. It is an extraordinary miscel- 
laneous literature, varied and copious in matter, full of 
conflicting ideas, cardinal truths, and hazardous guesses; 
and for the young mind the problem of orientation — 
that is of finding itself, of knowing the true East, is 
difficult. Literature, too, has an electric stimulation, 
and in the first onrush of the intellectual life brings 
that well-known storm and stress which is the true 
awakening; with eager and delighted surprise the soul 
feels fresh sensibilities and unsuspected energies rise in 
its being. It is a time of shocks, discoveries, experiences 
that change the face of the world. Reading the poets, 
the youth finds new dynamos in himself. A new truth 
unseals a new faculty in him; a new writer unlooses a 
new force in him; he becomes, like Briareus, hundred- 
handed, like Shakespeare, myriad-minded. So like a 
miracle is the discovery of the power of life. 



MAN AND THE RACE 17 

Let me illustrate the experience in the given case — 
the literature of the nineteenth century. It will all fall 
under three heads: the world of nature's frame, the 
world of man's action, the world of God's being. Na- 
ture is, in the first instance, a spectacle. One may see 
the common sights of earth, and still have seen little. 
The young eye requires to be trained in what to see, 
what to choose to see out of the vague whole, and so 
to see his true self reflected there in another form, for 
in the same landscape the farmer, the military engineer, 
the painter see each a different picture. Burns teaches 
the young heart to see nature realistically, definitely, in 
hard outline, and always in association with human life 
— and the presence of animals friendly and serviceable 
to man, the life of the farm, is a dominant note in the 
scene. Byron guides the eye to elemental grandeur in 
the storm and in the massiveness of Alp and ocean. 
Shelley brings out color and atmosphere and evokes 
the luminous spirit from every star and dew-drop and 
dying wave. Tennyson makes nature an artist's easel 
where from poem to poem glows the frescoing of the 
walls of life. Thus changing from page to page the 
youth sees nature with Burns as a man who sympathizes 
with human toil, with Byron as a man who would mate 
with the tempest, with Shelley as a man of almost spiri- 
tualized senses, with Tennyson as a man of artistic 
luxury. Again, nature is an order, a law in matter, such 
as science conceives her; and this phase appears incep- 
tively in ^^Queen Mab" and explicitly in "In Memoriam,'* 
and many a minor poem of Tennyson, not the less great 
because minor in his work, in which alone the scientific 
spirit of the age has found utterance equal to its own 
sublimity. Yet, again, nature is a symbol, an expres- 



i8 THE TORCH 

sion of truth itself in another medium than thought; and 
so, in minute ways, Burns moralized the "Mountain 
Daisy," and Wordsworth the "Small Celandine"; and, 
on the grand scale, Shelley mythologized nature in vast 
oracular figures of man's faith, hope, and destiny. And 
again, nature is a molding influence so close to human 
life as to be a spiritual presence about and within it. 
This last feeling of the participation of nature in life 
is so fundamental that no master of song is without it; 
but, in this group, Wordsworth is pre-eminent as its 
exponent, with such directness, certainty and power did 
he seize and express it. WTiat he saw in dalesmen was 
what the mountains had made them; what he told in 
"Tintern Abbey" was nature's making of him; what he 
sang in his lyric of ideal womanhood was such an inti- 
macy of nature with woman's being that it was scarcely 
to be divided from her spirit. The power which fashions 
us from birth, sustains the vital force of the body, and 
feeds its growing functions, seems to exceed the bUnd 
and mute region of matter, and feeding the senses with 
color, music and delight shapes the soul itself and guides 
it, and supports and consoles the child it has created 
in mortality. I do not overstate Wordsworth's sense of 
this truth; and it is a truth that twines about the roots 
of all poetry like a river of life. It explains to the grow- 
ing boy something in his own history, and he goes on in 
the paths he has begun to follow, it may be with touches 
of vague mystery but with an expectant, receptive and 
responsive heart. In regard to nature, then, the youth's 
life under the favor of these poets appreciates her in 
at least these four ways, artistically, scientifically, sym- 
bolically and spiritually, and begins to fix in molds of 
his ov;n spirit that miracle of change, the Protean being 
of matter. 



MAN AND THE RACE 19 

To turn to the world of man's life, the simplest gain 
from contact with this literature of which I am speaking 
is in the education of the historic sense. Romance dis- 
covered history, and seeking adventure and thriving on 
what it sought, made that great find, the Middle Ages, 
which the previous time looked on much as we regard 
the civilization of China with mingled ignorance and 
contempt. It found also the Gael and the Northmen, 
and many an outlying region, many a buried tract of 
time. In Scott's novels characteristically, but also in 
countless others, in the rescued and revived ballad of 
England and the North, and in the renewed forms of 
Greek imagination, the historic sense is strongly drawn 
on, and no reader can escape its culture, for the place 
of history and its inspirational power in literature is 
fundamental in the spirit of the nineteenth century. 
But what most arrests the young heart, in this world 
of man's life, is those ideas which we sum up as the 
Revolution, and the principle of democracy which is 
primary in the literature of the last age. There the 
three great words — liberty, fraternity and equality — 
and the theory that in Shelley was so burning an enthusi- 
asm and in Byron so passionate a force, are still aflame; 
and the new feeling toward man which was implicit in 
democracy is deeply planted in that aspect of fraternity 
which appears in the interest in the common lot, and in 
that aspect of liberty which appears in the sense of the 
dignity of the individual. Burns, Scott, Dickens illus- 
trate the one; Byron, Shelley and Carlyle the other. 
The literature of the great watchwords, the literature 
of the life of the humble classes, the literature of the 
rebellious individual will — the latter flashing out many 
a wild career and exploding many a startling theory of 



20 THE TORCH 

how life is to be lived — are the very core and substance 
of the time. The application of ideas to life in the large, 
of which Rousseau was so cardinal an example, opens 
an endless field in a century so rich in discovery, so 
active in intellect and so plastic in morals; and here one 
may wander at will. Here is matter for a lifetime. But 
without particularizing, it is plain how variously, how 
profoundly and vividly through this literature the mind 
is exercised in the human world, takes on the color, pic- 
turesqueness and movement of history, builds up the 
democratic social faith and develops the energy of in- 
dividual freedom, and becomes a place for the career of 
great ideas. 

There remains the world of God's being, or to vary 
the phrase in sympathy with the mode of approach char- 
acteristic of the nineteenth century, the world in which 
God is. It may be broadly stated that the notion of 
what used to be called an absentee God, a far-off Ruler 
overseeing by modes analogous to human administra- 
tion the affairs of earth as a distant province, finds no 
place in this literature of the last age. The note of 
thought is rather of the intimacy of God with his crea- 
tion and with the soul of man. God is known in two 
ways; as an idea in the intellect and as an experience in 
the emotions; and in poetry the two modes blend, and 
often blur where they blend. Their habitual expression 
in the great poets of the age is in pantheistic forms, but 
this is rather a matter of form than of substance. The 
immanence of the divine is the root-idea; in Wordsworth 
it is an immanence of sublime power, seized through com- 
munion with nature; in Shelley, who was more pro- 
foundly human, it is an immanence of transcendent love, 
seized through his sense of the destiny of the universe 



MAN AND THE RACE 21 

that carries in its bosom the glory of life; in Tennyson, 
in whom the sense of a veiled intellect was more deep, 
it is an immanence of mystery in both the outer and the 
inner world. In other parts of the field, God is also con- 
ceived in history, and there immanent as Providence. 
His immanence in the individual — a matter dark to 
any thought — is most explicitly set forth by Emerson. 
It is perhaps generally considered that in the literature 
of the nineteenth century there is a large sceptical and 
atheistic element; but this is an error. Genius by its 
own nature has no part in the spirit that denies; it is 
positive, affirms and creates. Its apparent denials will 
be found to be partial, and affect fragments of a dead 
past only; its denials are, in reality, higher and more 
universal affirmations. If Wordsworth appears to put 
nature in the place of God, or Shelley love, or Keats 
beauty, they only affirm that phase of the divine which 
is nighest to their own apprehension, affection and de- 
light. Their experience of the divine governs and blends 
with their intellectual theory, sometimes, as I have said, 
with a blur of thought. Each one's experience in these 
things is for himself alone, and private; the ways of 
the Spirit no man knows; but it is manifest that for 
the opening mind, whether of youth or of older years, 
the sense of eternity, however delicate, subtle and silent 
is its realm, is fed nobly, sweetly and happily, by these 
poets in whom the spirit of man crying for expression 
unlocks the secrecy of its relations to the infinite. 

Such is the nature of the contact of the mind with 
literature by means of which it enters on its race inheri- 
tance of idea and emotion, takes possession of the stored 
results, clothes itself with energies whose springs are in 
the earliest distance of time, and builds up anew^ for it- 



22 THE TORCH 

self the whole and various world as it has come to be 
known by man in his age-long experience. The illus- 
tration I have employed minimizes the constancy, the 
completeness, the vastness of the process ; for it takes no 
account of other disciplines, of religious tradition and 
practice, of oral transmission, and of such universal and 
intimate formative powers as mere language. But it will 
be found on analysis that all of these depend, in the 
main, on literature in the broad sense ; and, in the educa- 
tion of the soul in the higher life, the awakening, the re- 
vealing and upbuilding force lies, I am persuaded, in the 
peculiar charge of literature in which the race-mind has 
stamped an image of itself. 

It is obvious that what I have advanced, brings the 
principle of authority into a cardinal place in life, and 
clothes tradition with great power. It might seem that 
the individual in becoming one with the race-mind has 
only to endue himself with the past as with a garment, 
to take its mold with the patience of clay, and to be in 
the issue a recast of the past, thinking old thoughts, 
feeling old emotions, doing old actions, in pre-established 
ways. But this is to misconceive the process by which 
the individual effects this union; he does not take the 
impress of the race-mind as the wax receives the imprint 
of the seal. This union is an act of life, a process of 
energy, joy and growth, of self-expression; here learning 
is living, and there is no other way to know the doctrine 
than to do its will; so the race-mind is not copied, but 
is perpetually re-born in men, and the world which each 
one of us thus builds for himself out of his preferred 
capacities, memories and desires — our farmer's, engi- 
neer's, painter's world, as I have said — is his own origi- 
nal and unique world. There is none like it, none. 



MAN AND THE RACE 23 

Originality consists in this re-birth of the world in the 
young soul. This world, nevertheless, the world of each 
of us, is not one of willfulness, fantasy and caprice; if, 
on the one hand, it is such stuff as dreams are made of, 
on the other it is the stuff of necessity. It has a con- 
sistency, a law and fate, of its own, which supports, wields 
and sustains it. Authority is no more than the recog- 
nition of and obedience to this underlying principle of 
being, whose will is disclosed to us in man's life so far 
as that life in its wholeness falls within our view; in 
knowledge of this will all wisdom consists, of its action 
in us all experience is woven, and in union with it all 
private judgment is confirmed. Authority, truly inter- 
preted, is only another phase of that identity of the soul 
in all men by virtue of which society exists, and espe- 
cially that intellectual state arises, that state which used 
to be called the republic of letters and which is the insti- 
tution of the race-mind to be the center, the home and 
hope of civilization in all ages — that state where the 
unity of mankind is accomplished in the spiritual unities 
of science, art and love. 

To sum up these suggestions which I have thought it 
desirable to offer in order that the point of view taken in 
these lectures might, perhaps, be plain, I conceive of 
history as a single process in which through century 
after century in race after race the soul of man proceeds 
in a progressive comprehension of the universe and evo- 
lution of its own humanity, and passes on to each new 
generation its accumulated knowledge and developed 
energies, in their totality and without loss, at the acme 
of achievement. I conceive of this inheriting and be- 
queathing power as having its life and action in the race- 
mind. I conceive of literature as an organ of the race- 



24 THE TORCH 

mind, and of education as the process by which the in- 
dividual enters into the race-mind, becomes more and 
more man, and in the spiritual life mainly by means of 
literature. I conceive of the body of men who thus live 
and work in the soul as constituting the intellectual 
state, that republic of letters, in which the race-mind 
reaches, from age to age, its maximum of knowledge 
and power, in men of genius and those whose lives they 
illumine, move and direct; the unity of mankind is the 
ideal end of this state, and the freeing of the soul which 
takes place in it is its means. I conceive of the progres- 
sive life of this state, in civilization after civilization, as 
a perpetual death of the best, in culture after culture, 
for the good of the lower, a continuing sacrifice, in the 
history of humanity, of man for mankind. And from 
this mystery, though to some it may seem only the re- 
course of intellectual despair, I pluck a confident faith in 
that imperishable relation which man and his works 
contain, and which though known only in the continuity 
of the race-mind, I am compelled to beheve, has eternal 
reality. 



II 

THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 

The language of literature is the language of all the 
world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the 
notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which 
constitutes the various tongues of the earth, and 
conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of 
all men. Words are intermediary between thought and 
things. We express ourselves really not through words, 
which are only signs, but through what they signify — 
through things. Literature is the expression of life. 
The question, then, is — what things has literature found 
most effectual to express life, and has therefore habitu- 
ally preferred? and what tradition in consequence of this 
habit of preference has been built up in all literatures, 
and obtained currency and authority in this province 
of the wider realm of all art? It is an interesting 
question, and fundamental for any one who desires to 
appreciate literature understandingly. Perhaps you will 
permit me to approach it somewhat indirectly. 

You are all familiar with something that is called 
poetic diction — that is, a selected language specially 
fitted for the uses of poetry; and you are, perhaps, not 
quite so familiar with the analogous feature in prose, 
which is now usually termed preciosity, or preciousness 
of language, that is, a highly refined and esthetic diction, 
such as Walter Pater employs. The two are constant 
products of language that receives any literary cultiva- 

25 



26 THE TORCH 

tion, and they are sometimes called diseases of language. 
Thus, in both early and late Greek there sprang up lit- 
erary styles of expression, involving the preference of 
certain words, constructions and even cadences, and the 
teaching of art in these matters was the business of the 
Greek rhetorician; so in Italy, Spain, and France, in the 
Renaissance, similar styles, each departing from the 
common and habitual speech of the time, grew up, and 
in England you identify this mood of language in Eliza- 
beth's day as Euphuism. The phenomenon is common, 
and belongs to the nature of language. Poetic diction, 
however, you perhaps associate most clearly with the 
mannerism in language of the eighteenth century in 
England, when common and so-called vulgar words were 
exiled from poetry, and Gray, for example, could not 
speak of the Eton schoolboys as playing hoop, but only 
as '^chasing the rolling circle's speed," and when, to use 
the stock example, all green things were "verdant." This 
is fixed in our memory because Wordsworth has the 
credit of leading an attack on the poetic diction of that 
period, both critically in his prefaces and practically in 
his verse; he went to the other extreme, and introduced 
into his poetry such homely words as "tub," for ex- 
ample; he held that the proper language of poetry is the 
language of common life. So Emerson in his addresses, 
you remember, had recourse to the humblest objects for 
illustration, and shocked the formalism of his time by 
speaking of "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan." 
He was applying in prose the rule of Wordsworth in 
poetry. Walt WHiitman represents the extreme of this 
use of the actual language of men. But if you consider 
the matter, you will see that this choice of the homely 
word only sets up at last a fashion of homeliness in the 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 27 

place of a fashion of refinement, and breeds, for instance, 
dialect poets in shoals; and often the choice is really not 
of the word, but of the homely thing itself as the object 
of thought and expressive image of it; and in men so 
great as Emerson and Wordsworth the practice is a proof 
of that sympathy with common life which made them both 
great democrats. But in addition to the diction that 
characterizes an age, you must have observed that in 
every original writer there grows up a particular vocabu- 
lary, structure and rhythm that he affects and that in 
the end become his mannerism, or distinctive style, so 
marked that you recognize his work by its stamp alone, 
as in Keats, Browning, and Swinburne in poetry, and in 
Arnold in prose. In other words there is at work in the 
language of a man, or of an age even, a constant principle 
of selection which tends to prefer certain ways and forms 
of speech to others, and in the end develops a language 
characteristic of the age, or of the man. 

This principle of selection, whether it works toward 
refinement or homeliness, operates in the same way. It 
must be remembered — and it is too often forgotten : — 
that the problem of any artistic work is a problem of 
economy. How to get into the two hours' traffic of the 
stage the significance of a whole life, of a group of lives; 
how to pack into a sixteen-line lyric a dramatic situation 
and there sphere it in its own emotion; how to rouse 
passion and pour it in a three-minute poem, like Shel- 
ley's ^'Indian Air" — all these are problems in economy, 
by which speed, condensation, intensity are gained. 
Now words in themselves are colorless, except so far as 
their musical quality is concerned; but the thing that a 
word stands for has a meaning of its own and usually a 
meaning charged with associations, and often this asso- 



28 THE TORCH 

dative meaning is the primary and important one in its 
use. A rose, for example, is but the most beautiful of 
flowers in itself, but it is so charged with association in 
men's lives, and still more heavily charged with long use 
of emotion in literature, that the very Vv^ord and mere 
name of it awakes the heart and sets a thousand mem- 
ories unconsciously vibrating. This added meaning is 
what I am accustomed to term an overtone in words; 
and it is manifest that, in view of the necessity for econ- 
omy in poetic art, those words which are the richest and 
deepest in overtone will be preferred, because of the speed, 
certainty and fullness they contain. The question 
will be what overtones in life appeal most to this or that 
poet; he will reproduce them in his verse; Pope will use 
the overtones of a polished society, Wordsworth and 
Emerson those of humble life. Now our larger question 
is what overtones are characteristically preferred in great 
literature, in what objects do they most inhere, and in 
what way is the authoritative tradition of literature, as 
respects its means of expression, thus built up? 

It goes without saying that all overtones are either of 
thought or feeling. What modes of expression, then, 
what material objects, what forms of imagination, what 
abstract principles of thought, are most deeply charged 
with ideas and emotions? It will be agreed that, as a 
mere medium, music expresses pure emotion most directly 
and richly; music seems to enter the physical frame 
of the body itself, and move there with the warmth and 
instancy of blood. The sound of words, therefore, can- 
not be neglected, and in the melody and echo of poetry 
sound is a cardinal element; yet, it is here only the 
veining of the marble, it is not the material itself. In 
the objects which words summon up, there is sometimes 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 29 

an emotional power as direct and immediate as that of 
music itself, as for example, in the great features of na- 
ture, the mountains, the plains, the ocean, which awe 
even the savage mind. But, in general, the emotional 
power of material objects is lent to them by association, 
that is by the human use that has been made of them, as 
on the plain of Marathon, to use Dr. Johnson's old illus- 
tration, it is the thought of what happened there that 
makes the spectator's patriotism "gain force" as he 
surveys the scene. This human use of the world is the 
fountain of significance in all imaginative and poetic 
speech ; and in the broad sense history is the story of this 
human use of the world. 

History is so much of past experience as abides in 
race-memory; and underlies race-literature in the same 
way that a poet's own experience underlies his expres- 
sion of life. I do not mean that when a poet unlocks his 
heart, as Shakespeare did in his sonnets, he necessarily 
writes his own biography; in the poems he writes there 
may be much of actual event as in Burns's love songs, or 
little as in Dante's ''New Life." Much of a poet's experi- 
ence takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is 
oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the 
power, the purity and height of his utterance may not 
seldom be the greater because experience here uses the 
voices of desire. "All I could never be," in Browning's 
plangent line, has been the mounting strain of the sub- 
limest and the tenderest songs of men. All Ireland could 
never be, thrills and sorrows on her harp's most resonant 
string, and is the master-note to which her sweetest 
music ever returns. All man could never be makes the 
sad majesty of Virgil's verse. As with a man, what a na- 
tion strongly desires is no small part of its life, and is the 



30 THE TORCH 

mark of destiny upon it, whether for failure or success; 
so the note of world-empire is heard in the latest English 
verse, and the note of humanity — the service of all men 
— has always been dominant in our own. History, 
then, must be thought of, in its relation to literature, as 
including the desire as well as the performance of the race. 
History, however, in the narrowest sense, lies close to 
the roots of imaginative literature. The great place of 
history and its inspirational power in the literature of 
the last century I have already referred to; it is one of 
the most important elements in the extraordinary reach 
and range of that splendid outburst of imagination 
throughout Europe. Aristotle recognized the value of 
history as an aid to the imagination, at the very moment 
that he elevated poetry above history. In that neces- 
sary economy of art, of which I spoke, it is a great gain 
to have well-known characters and familiar events, such 
as Agamemnon and the Trojan War, in which much 
is already done for the spectator before the play begins. 
So our present historical novelists have their stories half- 
written for them in the minds of their readers, and es- 
pecially avail themselves of an emotional element there, 
a patriotism, which they do not have to create. The use 
of history to the imagination, however, goes farther than 
merely to spare it the pains of creating character and in- 
cident and evoking emotion. It assists a literary move- 
ment to begin with race-power much as a poet's or — 
as in Dickens's case — a novelist's own experience aids 
him to develop his work, however much that experience 
may be finally transformed in the work. Thus the novel 
of the last age really started its great career from Scott's 
historic sense working out into imaginative expression, 
and in a lesser degree from so minor a writer as Miss 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 31 

Edgeworth in whose Irish stories — which were con- 
temporary history — Scott courteously professed to find 
his own starting point. It is worth noting, also, that 
the Elizabethan drama had the same course. Shake- 
speare following Marlowe's example developed from the 
historical English plays, in which he worked in Scott's 
manner, into his full control of imagination in the purely 
ideal sphere. History has thus often been the hand- 
maid of imagination, and the foster-mother of great lite- 
rary ages. Yet to vary Aristotle's phrase — poetry is all 
history could never be. 

It appears to me, nevertheless, that history underlies 
race-literature in a far more profound and universal way. 
History is mortal: it dies. Yet it does not altogether die. 
Elements, features, fragments of it survive, and enter 
into the eternal memory of the race, and are there trans- 
formed, and — as we say — spiritualized. Literature is 
the abiding-place of this transforming power, and most 
profits by it. And to come to the heart of the matter, 
there have been at least three such cardinal transforma- 
tions in the past. 

The first transformation of history is mythology. I do 
not mean to enter on the vexed question of the origin of 
mythologies; and, of course, in referring to history as its 
ground, I include much more than that hero-worship 
such as you will find elaborated or invented in Carlyle's 
essay on Odin, and especially I include all that experi- 
ence of nature and her association with human toil and 
moods that you will find delineated with such marvelous 
subtleness and fullness in Walter Pater's essay on 
Dionysus. In mythology, mankind preserved from his 
primitive experience of nature, and his own heroic past 
therein, all that had any lasting significance; and, al- 



32 THE TORCH 

though all mythologies have specific features and a par- 
ticular value of their own, yet the race, coming to its best, 
as I have said, bore here its perfect blossom in Greek 
mythology. I know not by what grace of heaven, by 
what felicity of blend in climate, blood and the fortune 
of mortal life, but so it was that the human soul put forth 
the bud of beauty in the Greek race; and there, at the 
dawn of our own intellectual civilization and in the first 
sunrise of our poetry in Homer, was found a world filled 
with divine — with majestic and lovely figures, which 
had absorbed into their celestial being and forms the 
power of nature, the splendor and charm of the material 
sphere, the fructifying and beneficent operations of the 
external imiverse, the providence of the state and the 
inspiration of all arts and crafts, of games and wars 
and song; each of these deities was a flashing center of 
human energy, aspiration, reliance — with a realm and 
servants of its own; and mingling with them in fair 
companionship was a company of demi-gods and heroes, 
of kings and princes, and of golden youths, significant of 
the fate of all young life — Adonis, Hippolytus, Orestes. 
This mythologic world was near to earth, and it mixed 
with legendary history, such history as the "Iliad" con- 
tained, and also with the private and public life of the 
citizens, being the ceremonial religion of the state. It 
was all, nevertheless, the transformation that man had 
accomplished of his own past, his joys and sorrows, his 
labors, his insights and desires, the deeds of his ancestors 
— the human use that he made of the world. This was 
the body of idea and emotion to which the poet appealed 
in that age, precisely as our historical novelists now ap- 
peal to our own knowledge of history and pre-estab- 
lished emotion with regard to it, our patriotism. Here 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 33 

they found a language already full charged with emotion 
and intelligence, of which they could avail themselves, 
and speaking which they spoke with the voices of a 
thousand years. Nevertheless, it was at best a language 
like others, and subject to change and decay in expres- 
sive power. The time came when, the creative impulse 
in mythology having ceased and its forms being fixed, 
the mythic world lay behind the mind of the advancing 
race which had now attained conceptions of the physical 
universe, and especially ideas of the moral life, which 
were no longer capable of being held in and expressed 
by the mythic world, but exceeded the bounds of ear- 
lier thought and feeling and broke the ancient molds. 
Then it was that Plato desired to exile the poets and their 
mythology from the state. He could not be content, 
either, with a certain change that had occurred; for the 
creative power in mythology having long ceased, as I 
have said, the imagination put forth a new function — a 
meditative power — and brooding over the old fables of 
the world of the gods discovered in them, not a record 
of fact, but an allegorical meaning, a higher truth which 
the fable contained. Mythology passed thus into an em- 
blematic stage, in which it was again long used by man- 
kind, as a language of universal power. Plato, however, 
could not free himself from the mythologic habit of im- 
agination so planted in his race, and found the most ef- 
fective expression for his ideas in the myths of his own 
invention which he made up by a dexterous and poetic 
adaptation of the old elements; and others later than 
Plato have found it hard to disuse the mythologic lan- 
guage; for, although the old religion as a thing of faith 
and practice died away, it survived as a thing of form 
and feature in art, as a phase of natural symbolism and 



34 THE TORCH 

of inward loveliness of action and passion in poetry, as 
a chapter of romance in the history of the race; and the 
modern literatures of Europe are, in large measure, un- 
intelligible without this key. 

The second great transformation of history is chivalry. 
Here the phenomenon is nearer in time and lies more 
within the field of observation and knowledge; it is pos- 
sible to trace the stages of the growth of the story of Ro- 
land with some detail and precision; but, on the other 
hand, the Arthur myth reaches far back into the be- 
ginnings of Celtic imagination, and all such race-myths 
tend to appropriate and embody in themselves the char- 
acteristic features both of one another and of whatever is 
held to be precious and significant in history or even in 
classical and Eastern legend. The true growth, however, 
is that feudal culture, which we know as knighthood, 
working out its own ideal of action and character and 
sentiment on a basis of bravery, courtesy, and piety, 
and thereby generating patterns of knighthood, typical 
careers, and in the end an imaginative interpretation of 
the purest spiritual life itself in the various legends of 
the Holy Grail. As in the pagan world the forms and 
fables of mythology and their interaction downward with 
the human world furnished the imaginative interpreta- 
tion of life as it then was, so for the medieval age, the 
figures and tales of chivalry and their interaction upward 
with the spiritual world of Christianity, and also with 
the magic of diabolism round about, furnished the imagi- 
native interpretation of that later life. It was this new 
body of ideas and emotion in the minds of men that the 
medieval poets appealed to, availed themselves of, and 
so spoke a language of imagery and passion that was a 
world-language, charged as I have said with the thought 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 35 

and feeling, the tradition, of a long age. What happened 
to the language of mythology, happened also to this 
language; it lost the power of reality, and men arose who, 
being in advance of its conceptions of life, desired to 
exile it, denounce it or laugh it out of existence, like 
Ascham in England, and Cervantes in Spain. It also 
suffered that late change into an allegorical or emble- 
matic meaning, and had a second life in that form as in 
the notable instance of Spenser's ^Taerie Queene.'^ It 
also could not die, but — just as mythology revived 
in the Alexandrian poets for a season, and fed Theo- 
critus and Virgil — chivalry was re-born in the last cen- 
tury, and in Tennyson's Arthur, and in Wagner's ' 'Par- 
sifal" lived again in two great expressions of ideal life. 

The third great transformation of history is contained 
in the Scriptures. The Bible is, in itself, a singularly 
complete expression of the whole life of a race in one 
volume — its faith and history blending in one body of 
poetry, thought and imaginative chronicle. It contains 
a celestial world in association with human events; its 
patriarchs are like demi-gods, and it has heroes, legends, 
tales in good numbers, and much romantic and passion- 
ate life, on the human side, besides its great stores of 
spirituality. In literary power it achieves the highest in 
the kinds of composition that is uses. It is as a whole, 
regarded purely from the human point of view, not un- 
fairly to be compared in mass, variety, and scope of ex- 
pression, with mythology and chivalry as constituting a 
third great form of imaginative language; nor has its his- 
tory been dissimilar in the Christian world to which it 
came with something of that same remoteness in time and 
reality that belonged equally to mythology and chivalry. 
It was first used in a positive manner, as a thing of fact 



36 THE TORCH 

and solid belief; but there soon grew up, you remember, 
in the Christian world that habit of finding a hidden 
meaning in its historical record, of turning it to a parable, 
of extracting from it an allegorical signification. It be- 
came, not only in parts but as a whole, emblematic, and 
its interpretation as such was the labor of centuries. 
This is commonly stated as the source of that universal 
mood of allegorizing which characterized the medieval 
world, and was as strongly felt in secular as in religious 
writers. Its historical tales, its theories of the universe, 
its cruder morals in the Jewish ages, have been scoffed 
at, just as was the case with the Greek myth, from the 
Apostate to Voltaire and later; but how great are its 
powers as a language is seen in the completeness with 
which it tyrannized over the Puritan life in England and 
made its history, its ideas, its emotions the habitual and 
almost exclusive speech of that strong Cromwellian age. 
In our country here in New England it gave the mold 
of imagination to our ancestors for two whole centuries. 
A book, which contains such power that it can make 
itself the language of life through so many centuries and 
in such various peoples is to be reckoned as one of the 
greatest instruments of race-expression that man pos- 
sesses. 

Mythology, chivalry, the Scriptures are the tongues of 
the imagination. It is far more important to know them 
than to learn French or German or Italian, or Latin or 
Greek; they are three branches of that universal lan- 
guage which though vainly sought on the lips of men is 
found in their minds and hearts. To omit these in edu- 
cation is to defraud youth of its inheritance; it is like de- 
stroying a long-developed organ of the body, like putting 
out the eye or silencing the nerves of hearing. Nor is it 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 37 

enough to look them up in encyclopedias and notes, and 
so obtain a piecemeal information; one must grow fa- 
miliar with these forms of beauty, forms of honor, forms 
of righteousness, have something of the same sense of 
their reality as that felt by Homer and Virgil, by the 
singer of Roland and the chronicler of the ''Mort 
d'Arthur," by St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. He must 
form his imagination upon these idealities, and load his 
heart with them; else many a masterpiece of the human 
spirit will be lost to him, and most of the rest will be im- 
paired. If one must know vocabulary and grammar 
before he can understand the speech of the mouth, much 
more must he know well mythology, chivalry and Bible- 
lore before he can take possession of the wisdom that the 
race-mind has spoken, the beauty it has molded life 
into, as a thing of passion and action, the economy of 
lucid power it has achieved for perfect human utterance, 
in these three fundamental forms of a true world-lan- 
guage. The literature of the last century is permeated 
with mythology, chivalry and to a less degree with 
Scripture, and no one can hope to assimilate it, to re- 
ceive its message, unless his mind is drenched with these 
same things; and the further back his tastes and desires 
lead him into the literature of earlier times, the greater 
will be his need of this education in the material, the 
modes and the forms of past imagination. 

It may be that a fourth great tongue of the imagina- 
tion is now being shaped upon the living of men in 
the present and succeeding ages. If it be so, this will be 
the work of the democratic idea, which is now still at the 
beginning of its career ; but since mythology and chivalry 
had their development in living men, it is natural to 
suppose that the human force is still operative in our 



38 THE TORCH 

own generation as it once was in those of Hellenic and 
medieval years. The characteristic literature of de- 
mocracy is that of its ideas, spiritualized in Shelley, and 
that of the common lot as represented in the sphere of 
the novel, spiritualized most notably in Victor Hugo. In 
our own country it is singular to observe that the demo- 
cratic idea, though efficient in politics, does not yet es- 
tablish itself in imaginative literature with any great 
power of brilliancy, does not create great democratic 
t3^es, or in any way express itself adequately. This 
democratic idea, in Dickens for example, uses the ex- 
perience of daily life, that is, contemporary history, or at 
least it uses an artistic arrangement of such experience; 
but the novel as a whole has given us in regard to the 
common lot, rather a description of life in its variety 
than that concentrated and essential significance of life 
which we call typical. If democracy in its future course 
should evolve such a typical and spiritualized embodi- 
ment of itself as chivalry found in Arthur and the Round 
Table, or as the heroic age of Greece found in Achilles 
and the Trojan War, or as the genius of Rome found 
in Aeneas and his fortunes, then imagination — race- 
imagination will be enriched by this fourth great instru- 
ment; but this is to cast the horoscope of too distant an 
hour. I introduce the thought only for the sake of in- 
cluding in this broad survey of race-imagination that 
experience of the present day, that history in the con- 
temporary process of being transformed, out of which the 
mass of the books of the day is now made. 

Let me recur now to that principle of selection which 
through the cumulative action of repeated preferences of 
phrase and image fixes a habit of choice which at last 
stamps the diction of a man, a school or an age. It is 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 39 

plain that in what I have called the transformation of 
history, of which literature is the express image, there is 
the same principle of selection which, working through 
long periods of race-life, results at last in those idealities 
of persons and events in which inhere most powerfully 
those overtones of beauty, honor and righteousness that 
the race has found most precious both for idea and 
emotion; and to these are to be added what I have 
had no time to include and discuss, the idealities of 
persons and events found outside mythology, chivalry 
and Scripture, in the work of individual genius like 
Shakespeare, which nevertheless have the same ground 
in history, in experience, that in them is similarly trans- 
formed. Life-experience spiritualized is the formula of 
all great literature; it may range from the experience of 
a single life, like Sidney's in his sonnets to that of an 
empire in VirgiPs "Aeneid," or of a religion in Dante's 
"Comedy." In either case the formula which makes it 
literature is the same. I have illustrated the point by 
the obvious spiritualizations of history. Race-life, from 
the point of view of literature, results at last in these 
molds of imagination, and all else though slowly, yet 
surely, drops away into oblivion. In truth, it is only by 
being thus spiritualized that anything human survives 
from the past. The rose, I said, has been so dipped in 
human experience that it is less a thing of nature than 
a thing of passion. In the same way Adonis, Jason and 
Achilles, Roland and Arthur, Lancelot, Percival and Gala- 
had, Romeo and Hamlet have drawn into themselves 
such myriads of human lives by admiration and love 
that from them everything material, contemporary and 
mortal has been refined away, and they seem to all of 
us like figures moving in an immortal air. They have 



40 THE TORCH 

achieved the eternal world. To do this is the work of 
art. It may seem a fantastic idea, but I will venture the 
saying of it, since to me it is the truth. Art, I sup- 
pose, you think of as the realm and privilege of selected 
men, of sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, men of 
genius and having something that has always been called 
divine in their faculty; but it appears to me that art, 
like genius, is something that all men share, that it is 
the stamp of the soul in every one, and constitutes their 
true and immaterial life. The soul of the race, as it is 
seen in history and disclosed by history, is an artist soul; 
its career is an artistic career; its unerring selective 
power expels from its memory every mortal element and 
perserves only the essential spirit, and thereof builds 
its ideal imaginative world through which it finds its 
true expression; its more perfect comprehension of the 
world is science, its more perfect comprehension of its 
own nature is love, its more perfect expression of its 
remembered life is art. Mankind is the grandest and 
surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure 
fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the 
beautiful soul. 

It appears, then, that the language of literature in the 
race is a perfected nature and a perfected manhood and 
a perfected divinity, so far as the race at the moment can 
see toward perfection. The life which literature builds 
up ideally out of the material of experience is not wholly 
a past life, but there mingles with it and at last con- 
trols it the life that man desires to live. Fullness of 
life — that fullness of action which is poured in the 
epic, that fullness of passion which is poured in the 
drama, that fullness of desire that is poured in the lyric 
— the life of which man knows himself capable and 



THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 41 

realizes as the opportunity and hope of life — this is the 
life that literature enthrones in its dream. You have 
heard much of the will to believe and of the desire to 
live: literature is made of these two, warp and woof. 
Race after race believes in the gods it has come to know 
and in the heroes it has borne, and in what it wishes to 
believe of divine and human experience; and the life it 
thus ascribes to its gods and to its own past is that life 
it most ardently desires to live. Literature, which 
records this, is thus the chief witness to the nobility, the 
constancy and instancy of man's effort for perfection. 
What wonder, then, if in his sublimest and tenderest song 
there steals that note of melancholy so often struck by 
the greatest masters in the crisis and climax of their 
works, and which, when so struck, has more of the infi- 
nite in it, more of the human in it, than any other in the 
slowly triumphant theme! 

To sum up — the language of literature is experience; 
the language of race-literature is race-experience, or his- 
tory, the human use that the race has made of the world. 
The law appears to be that history in this sense is slowly 
transformed by a refining and spiritualizing process into 
an imaginative world, such as the world of mythology, 
chivalry or the Scriptures, and that this world in turn 
becomes emblematic and fades away into an expression 
of abstract truth. The crude beginning of the process is 
seen in our historical fiction; the height of it in Arthur 
or in Odin; the end of it in the symbolic or allegoric in- 
terpretation of even so human a book as Virgil's 
"Aeneid." Human desire for the best enters into this 
process with such force that the record of the past slowly 
changes into the prophecy of the future, and out of the 
passing away of what was is built the dream of what 



42 THE TORCH 

shall be; so arises in race-life the creed of what man 
wishes to believe and the dream of the life he desires to 
live; this human desire for belief and for life is, in the 
final analysis, the principle of selection whose operation 
has been sketched, and on its validity rests the validity 
and truth of all literature. 



Ill 

THE TITAN MYTH 



I PROPOSE now to illustrate by the specific example 
of the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology 
is a tongue of the imagination — a living tongue of the 
universal imagination of men. 

The Titan Myth — I wonder what it means to you? 
The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder 
than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the 
Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as 
mere giants, such as Jack killed — medieval monsters 
of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them 
rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep 
and mystery of those figures you may remember out of 
Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and 
darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured 
race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur, 
embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence, 
light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was born, 
and with him the other deities of the then new divine 
world, and when he dethroned his father and put the new 
gods in possession of the imiverse, these children of the 
old regime, misliking change, took the father's part, and 
warred on the usurper of ancient power, and were over- 
thrown by his lightnings, and mountains were piled on 
them; and now you may read in Longfellow of Encela- 
dus, the t5^e and image of their fate, buried under 

43 



44 THE TORCH 

Etna whose earthquakes are the struggling of the great 
Titan beneath. This was the war of the Titans and the 
gods. One of the Titans, however, stood apart from the 
rest, being wiser than they. Prometheus made friends 
with Zeus, but his fortune was not less grievous to him; 
for when he saw that Zeus took no account of men — ''of 
miserable men," — but yearned to destroy them from 
the face of the earth, he took pity on mankind, and stole 
for them the celestial fire and gave it to them, for until 
then man had lived a life of mere nature, without knowl- 
edge, or any arts, not even that of agriculture. Prome- 
theus was the fire-bringer; and, bringing fire, he brought 
to men all the uses of fire, such as metal-working, for 
example, and in a word he gave to mankind its entire 
career, the long labor of progressive civilization, and 
the life of the spirit itself which is kindled, as we say, 
from the Promethean spark within. It was but a step 
for the Pagan imagination, at a later stage, to think of 
this patron of mankind as the creator of men, since he 
was the fosterer of their lives; it was said that he had 
made clay images, and moistened these witli holy water, 
so that they became living creatures — men. Zeus was 
angered by this befriending of the human race; and he 
flung Prometheus upon a mountain of the Caucasus, 
chained him there, and planted a vulture to eat always 
on his entrails; and in the imagination of men there 
he hangs to this day. Yet there was one condition on 
which he might be released and again received into 
heaven. He alone knew the secret of the fall of Zeus — 
the means by which it would be brought about; and if 
he would tell this secret, so that Zeus might avoid the 
danger as was possible, and thereby his unjust reign 
become perpetual, Prometheus might save himself. But 



THE TITAN MYTH 45 

the Titan so loved justice that he kept silence, knowing 
that in the course of ages at last Zeus would fall. This 
was the myth of Prometheus. 

Of the aspects which the entire legend presents in 
literature, there are three which stand out. I shall ask 
you to consider the first as the cosmic idea — the idea 
of the law of human progress that it contains. To the 
Greek mind the development of the universe consisted 
in the supplanting of a lower by a higher power, under 
the will of a supreme fate or necessity which was above 
both gods and men: after Uranus was Chronos, after 
Chronos was Zeus, after Zeus there would be other gods. 
The Greeks were themselves a higher power in their 
world, and as such had conquered the Persians; theirs 
was the victory of light over darkness, of civilization 
over barbarism, and therefore on the walls of their great 
temple, the Parthenon, which was the embodiment of 
their spiritual consciousness as a race, they depicted 
three great mythic events symbolizing the victory of the 
higher power — that is, the war of the Centaurs and 
the Lapithae, of the Athenians and the Amazons, and 
of the gods and the Titans. This cosmic idea — the 
Greek conception of progress — it is more convenient 
to delay to the next lecture. Secondly, I shall ask you 
to consider the conception of the friend of man suffering 
for his sake — one that without irreverence may be desig- 
nated as the Christ-idea. This phase of the myth natu- 
rally has received less development in literature, inas- 
much as the ideas and emotions it embodies find expres- 
sion inevitably and almost exclusively in the symbol of 
the Cross and the life that led up thereto. But for 
those who, in the chances of time have stood apart from 
the established faith of Christendom, and have not sel- 



46 THE TORCH 

dom encountered the creed and practice of their age in 
persecution, being victims for the sake of reason — for 
these men, the figure of Prometheus has been in the 
place of the Cross, an image of themselves, their proto- 
type. The expression of this particular idea, however, 
has been slight in literature; but it naturally appears 
there, and Prometheus has come to be the characteristic 
symbol of the peculiar suffering of genius ; so Longfellow 
uses it in his 'Trometheus." 

"All is but a symbol painted 
Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer; 
Only those are crowned and sainted 
Who with grief have been acquainted. 
Making nations nobler, freer." 

Under this aspect Prometheus is the martyr of humanity. 
Thirdly, I shall ask you to consider the conception of 
Prometheus, not as an individual, but as identified with 
mankind, as mankind itself suffering in all its race-life 
and throughout its history, wretched, tyrannized over 
by some dark and unjust necessity, yet unterrified, reso- 
lute, invincible in its faith in that 

''One far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 

The imagination, age after age, finds in Prometheus such 
a symbol of man's race-life. This is to conceive of Pro- 
metheus as the idea of humanity. 

iEschylus fixed the form of the Titan for the imagina- 
tion and surrounded it with the characteristic scene. 
He nailed Prometheus in chains riveted into the rock, 
the vast desolate cliffs of the Caucasus, an indistinct and 
mighty figure, frosted with the night and watching the 
stars in their courses with lidless eyes, the dark vulture 



THE TITAN MYTH 47 

hovering in his bosom. Perhaps I can make the scene 
more real to you by a passage from a letter of a friend 
who last spring was in that solitude. ^'All the fore- 
noon,'^ he says, "I have been traveling forward beneath 
the giant wall of the frosty Caucasus. The snow-clad 
plain serves as a dazzling foreground to the towering 
rugged peaks so sharply defined in steel white and dull 
black wherever the snow leaves the beetling rock bare. 
The gorges and ravines which are here and there visible 
look like old-time scars of jagged wounds on the sullen 
face of the mountains. The dreary solitude of the scene 
is very impressive. Far off yonder in the distance I 
can picture the chill and desolate vulture-peak where 
Prometheus, in his galling chains, longed for the day to 
give peace to ^s tar ry-kir tied night' (if I remember my 
iEschylus rightly) and yearned for the sun to arise and 
dispel the hoar-frost of dawn. It all comes up again 
before my mind in this far-away solitary region." 
Thither to this scene, that my friend describes, came 
with comfort or counsel the daughters of the Ocean, and 
old Oceanus himself, the Titan's brother, and lo on her 
wanderings, and Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to make 
terms with Prometheus, or inflict new tortures should he 
refuse. But Prometheus remained the resolute and faith- 
ful sufferer; there stretched on the rock he would await 
the sure coming of that justice which is above even the 
heavens of Zeus and contains and orders even them. It 
is a sublime moral situation. Who could ever forget 
that figure, once stamped on his imagination, though but 
a schoolboy? So Byron remembered his Harrow days: 
"Of the Trometheus' of iEschylus," he says, "I was 
passionately fond as a boy. It was one of the Greek 
dramas we used to read three times a year at Harrow. 



48 THE TORCH 

Indeed, it and the 'Medea' were the only ones, except 
the 'Seven Against Thebes,^ which pleased me. The 
Trometheus,' if not exactly in my plan has always been 
so much in my head that I well understand how its 
influences have passed into all I have done." It goes 
with this acknowledgment, and bespeaks the critic's acute 
penetration, to find Jeffrey affirming that there is no 
work of modern literature that more than Byron's 
"Manfred" approaches the 'Trometheus" of ^Eschylus. 
Byron only illustrates the fascination that this myth 
has for the race; the world will never let go of this 
symbol of itself. 

The moment and the cause, the invincible resolution 
denying the will of the apparent gods of the hour in 
obedience to the higher light within, are the same that 
have nailed all martyrs to the cross, sent patriots to rot 
in prisons, and borne on the leaders of all forlorn 
hopes in their death-charges, and of these the history 
of the last century gives many a modern instance. In 
our own time Siberia has been one vast Caucasus; I re- 
member when not long ago its name was Crete; and now 
it is Macedonia — they are all tracts of that desolation 
that swallows up in its voiceless solitude and buries from 
the ears of God and man the human cry. In the mind 
and memory of the race there are two great mountains; 
over against Sinai towers the peak of the Caucasus with 
perpetual challenge; yet they are twin peaks — one, 
the mount of faith in God, the other, the mount of faith 
in man. You know how the race, from time to time, 
as great moods sweep over it — the mood of asceticism, 
or of Christian chivalry, or of world conquest, sets up 
some historic figure as the type and expression of this 
mood — some St. Francis, or Philip Sidney, or Napoleon; 



THE TITAN MYTH 49 

this is because the race sees in these men a greater image 
of itself in those particular moods. So, in a more ab- 
stract way the race takes some part of its self-conscious- 
ness — say, its perception of what is evil in its own heart 
— and puts it outside of itself so as to see it better, 
projects or objectifies itself, as we say, in an image, like 
Mephistopheles ; it sees in Mephistopheles itself in a 
certain mood — a mood of mocking denial of all good. 
So, in its own history and memory the race perceives 
that often its greatest men, those who have been its 
civilizers, have been victims of the powers of their 
day, and have served the race and carried on its life 
by fidelity to their own hearts and the truth in them in 
spite of the utmost suffering that could be inflicted on 
them. The race thinks of these men as constituting its 
ov/n life, gathers and blends them in one being and finds 
that being — the type that stands for its continuous 
Hfe — in Prometheus. In him the race projects — as 
I have said — or objectifies itself in the mood of suffer- 
ing the worst for the good of men, with undismayed 
courage and unbroken will. Prometheus is man as he 
knows himself in history, the immortal sufferer under 
injustice bringing even by his sorrows the higher justice 
that shall at last prevail — he is this figure set clear and 
separate before the mind: he is the idea of humanity, 
conceived in the characteristic act of its noblest life — - 
he is mankind. 

I dwelt in the last lecture on the treasure that the race- 
imagination possesses in the Greek myths, as a means 
of expression; in the whole inheritance of our literature 
there is nothing that the poet finds so great a gift as 
these forms and tales of the mythic world in which the 
work of creation is already half done for him, and the 



50 THE TORCH 

storing of ideas and emotions has been accomplished, 
so that with a word he can release in the mind the flood 
of meaning they contain, as if he pushed an electric 
button; they are to him what the common law is to a 
lawyer — the stored results of the past, in experience 
and principle; he has only to adopt them into his human 
verse, as he adopts into his verse of nature the Andes 
and Ararat. It was not surprising that such a tale as 
the Titan Myth should be among the chief memories of 
the race, never wholly forgotten; yet it waited for its 
moment. After the first mention of it in literature three 
thousand years went by, before the moment came. Then 
the French Revolution struck its hour. It is true that 
the myth stirred in the Renaissance when all things 
Greek revived, and Calderon, the great Spanish poet, 
treated some minor aspects of it; but, in and about the 
Revolution, it was handled repeatedly by great poets 
who strove to recast the story and use it to express the 
ideas and emotions of their own age. Goethe in his 
youth, and the Germans — Herder and Schlegel, each 
wrote a Prometheus; in Italy Monti took the subject; in 
England Landor and Byron touched it lightly, and Keats 
and Shelley made it the matter of great poems ; and later, 
in France, where Voltaire had approached it, Victor 
Hugo and Edgar Quinet elaborated it; nor do these 
names exhaust the list of those who in the last century 
made it a principal theme of verse. This re-birth was 
a natural one; for the French Revolution, which you 
remember Wendell Phillips in his great Harvard speech 
described as ^'the most unmixed blessing that ever befell 
mankind'^ — the French Revolution was rooted in the 
idea of humanity and was the cause of humanity. More- 
over, the Revolution has a Titanic quality in itself; there 



THE TITAN MYTH 51 

is the feeling of large earth-might in the struggle of the 
heavy masses of the darkened people, peasant-born; and 
in their revolt against the kingdoms of the world whose 
serfs they were, there was the sense of a strife with the 
careless luxury of the unjust gods; there was in the 
wretchedness of the European peoples the state of man 
that Prometheus pitied when he rebuked Zeus for tak- 
ing no account of men — "of miserable men"; and in 
the tumult and ardor and invincible faith of the Revo- 
lution there was both the Titanic atmosphere and the 
Promethean spirit. Shelley was the poet through whom 
the literary expression of the Revolution was to be 
poured. It is necessary to mark the time precisely. 
The Revolution had flamed, and in Napoleon, whom more 
than one poet celebrated as the Prometheus of the age, 
had apparently flamed out. The Revolution, as a politi- 
cal idea seemed to have failed, and Europe sank back 
into the arms of king and priest. It was then that these 
great Englishmen, Byron and Shelley, in their youth 
took up the fallen cause and bore it onward in their 
hands till Byron died for it in the war of Greek Inde- 
pendence and Shelley, having sung his song, sank in the 
waters of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Shelley came to this subject naturally and through 
years of unconscious preparation; and when the moment 
of creation came, he felt the Titanic quality, that I 
spoke of, in the Revolution, felt the Promethean secur- 
ity of victory it contained — felt, too, the Promethean 
suffering which was the heart of mankind as he saw it 
surveying Europe in his day, and knew it in his own 
bosom as well. He conceived of Prometheus as man- 
kind, of his history and fate as the destiny of man; and 
being full of that far sight of Prometheus which saw 



52 THE TORCH 

the victorious end — being as full of it as the wheel of 
Ezekiel was full of eyes — he saw, as the center of all 
vision, Prometheus Unbound — the millennium of man- 
kind. He imagined the process of that great liberation 
and its crowning prosperities. This is his poem. In 
this poem the Revolution as a moral idea reached its 
height; that is what makes it, from the social point of 
view, the race-point of view, the greatest work of the 
last century in creative imagination — for it is the sum- 
mary and center, in the world of art, of the greatest 
power in that century — the power of the idea of human- 
ity. I shall present only the cardinal phases of the 
dramatic situation, in the poem, and of the moral idea 
by which it is solved. 

The poem opens in the Caucasus, with Prometheus 
bound to the rock, an indistinct figure such as I have 
described him; his form is left undefined — he is a voice 
in the vast solitudes; and his first speech, which dis- 
closes the situation, makes you aware of physical suffer- 
ing, mental anguish, an undismayed and patient will, an 
unconquerable faith — these are the qualities which 
make him an elemental being and characterize him at 
once. It is an ^schylean speech, phrases from iEschylus 
are welded into it; but the moral grandeur of Prometheus 
— all, that is, except the historical and physical features 
of the scene — bears the creative mark of Shelley's own 
sublimity of conception. 

"Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits 
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds 
Which Thou and I alone of living things 
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth 
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou 
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, 



THE TITAN MYTH 53 

And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, 
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope; 
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate. 
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn 
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. 
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours. 
And moments aye divided by keen pangs 
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, 
Scorn and despair — these are mine empire: 
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest 
From thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God! 
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame 
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here 
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain. 
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured ; without herb, 
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. 
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 

"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. 
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? 
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, 
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm. 
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below, 
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? 
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 

"The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains 
Eat with their burning cold into my bones. 
Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips 
His beak in poison not his own, tears up 
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by. 
The ghastly people of the realm of dream. 
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged 
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds 
When the rocks split and close again behind: 
While from their loud abysses howling throng 
The genii of the storm, urging the rage 
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. 



54 THE TORCH 

''And yet to me welcome is day and night, 
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, 
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs 
The leaden-colored east; for then they lead 
The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom 
— As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim — 
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood 
From these pale feet^ which then might trample thee 
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. 
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin 
Will hunt thee undefended through the wide Heaven ! 
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, 
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief 
Not exultation, for I hate no more. 
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse 
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, 
Whose many-voiced Echoes, through the mist 
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! 
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost. 
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept 
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, 
Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! 
And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings 
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss, 
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock 
The orbed world! If then my words had power, 
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish 
Is dead within; although no memory be 
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! 
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak." 

Prometheus's character, you observe, is developed in 
the point that he no longer hates Zeus, but is filled with 
pity for him. Later in the scene the Furies enter, to tor- 
ture the Titan with new torments. What torments will 
be the most piercing to the suffering spirit of man — the 
spirit that suffers in advancing human welfare? W^ill 
it not be the fact that the gifts he has given man have 



THE TITAN MYTH 55 

proved evil gifts, and that in the effort for perfection 
man has but the more heaped on himself damnation? 
The thought is found in many treatments of the myth: 
Themis warned Prometheus that in aiding man with 
fire and the arts he only increased man's woes. It is the 
old pessimistic thought that civilization is a curse — 
that the only growth of the soul is growth in the capacity 
for pain, for disillusion, for despair. Shelley introduces 
it in quite the Promethean spirit — as a thing, which if 
it be, is to be borne. What were the two characteristic 
failures of human hope in Shelley's eyes? The capital 
instances? They were the failure of Christianity to 
bring the millennium, and the failure of the French Revo- 
lution in the same end — and not only their failure to 
bring the millennium, but, on the contrary, their in- 
fluence in still further confounding the state of mankind 
and flooding the nations with new miseries. The Furies 
show these two failures to Prometheus in vision. The 
passage is somewhat involved as the vision is successive- 
ly disclosed through the words of the chorus of Furies, 
of the attendant sisters lone and Panthea, and of Pro- 
metheus, but I will endeavor to make it plain: 

"Chorus 

"The pale stars of the morn 
Shine on a misery, dire to be borne. 
Dost thou faint, mi'^hty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. 
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man? 
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran 
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, 
Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever. 
One came forth of gentle worth 
Smiling on the sanguine earth; 
His words outlived him, like swift poison 
Withering up truth, peace, and pity. 



S6 THE TORCH 

Look! where round the wide horizon 
Many a million-peopled city 
Vomits smoke in the bright air. 
Mark that outcry of despair! 
'T is his mild and gentle ghost 
Wailing for the faith he kindled: 
Look again, the flames almost 
To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled: 
The survivors round the embers 
Gather in dread. 

Joy, joy, joy! 

Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers, 
And the future is dark, and the present is spread 
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. 

"Semichorus I 

*' Drops of bloody agony flow 
From his white and quivering brow. 
Grant a little respite now: 
See a disenchanted nation 
Springs like day from desolation; 
To Truth its state is dedicate, 
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; 
A legioned band of linked brothers 
Whom Love calls children ^ — 

"Semichorus II 

" 'T is another's: 
See how kindred murder kin: 
*T is the vintage time for death and sin: 
Blood, like new wine, bubbles within: 
Till Despair smothers 
The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win. 

[All the Furies vanish, except one] 

loNE. Hark, sister ! what a low yet dreadful groan 
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart 
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep. 
And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves. 



THE TITAN MYTH 57 

Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? 

Panthea. Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more. 

loNE. What didst thou see? 

Panthea. A woful sight: a youth 

With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. 

loNE. What next? 

Panthea. The heaven around, the earth below 

Was peopled with thick shapes of human death, 

All horrible, and wrought by human hands. 

And some appeared the work of human hearts, 

For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: 

And other sights too foul to speak and live 

Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear 

By looking forth: those groans are grief enough. 

Fury. Behold an emblem: those who do endure 

Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap 

Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. 

Prometheus. Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; 

Close those wan lips; let that thorn- wounded brow 

Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears! 

Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, 

So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix. 

So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. 

O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak. 

It hath become a curse. I see, I see 

The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just, 

Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee. 

Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home, 

An early-chosen, late-lamented home; 

As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind ; 

Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells: 

Some — Hear I not the multitude laugh loud? — 

Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms 

Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles, 

Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood 

By the red light of their own burning homes. 

Fury. Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; 

Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind. 

Prometheus. Worse? 



S8 . THE TORCH 

Fury. In each human heart terror survives 

The ruin it has gorged: the loftiest fear 

All that they would disdain to think were true: 

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds 

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. 

They dare not devise good for man's estate, 

And yet they know not that they do not dare. 

The good want power, but to weep barren tears. 

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. 

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; 

And all best things are thus confused to ill. 

Many are strong and rich, and would be just, 

But live among their suffering fellow-men 

As if none felt: they know not what they do. 

Prometheus. Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; 

And yet I pity those they torture not. 

Fury. Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes] 

Prometheus Ah. woe! 

Ah woe ! Alas ! pain, pain ever, for ever ! 

I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear 

Thy works within my woe-illumed mind, 

Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave. 

The grave hides all things beautiful and good: 

I am a God and cannot find it there. 

Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge, 

This is defeat, fierce king, not victory. 

The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul 

With new endurance, till the hour arrives 

When they shall be no types of things which are. 

Panthea. Alas! what sawest thou? 

Prometheus There are two woes: 

To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one. 

Names are there. Nature's sacred watchwords, they 

Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry ; 

The nations thronged around, and cried aloud, 

As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love! 

Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven 

Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear. 

Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil. 

This was the shadow of the truth I saw." 



THE TITAN MYTH 59 

The victory of Prometheus is in his declaration that 
he pities those who are not tortured by such scenes. He 
had already disclosed this pitiful heart in his first 
speech; and, desiring to hear the curse he had originally 
launched on Zeus, and being gratified in this wish by the 
Earth, he had revoked it: 

*'It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; 
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. 
I wish no living thing to suffer pain." 

Thus he had forgiven his great enemy. 

As I read the play, this forgiveness of Zeus by Pro- 
metheus makes the predestined hour of the downfall of 
Zeus. The chariot bears aloft the new principle of su- 
preme being, a higher and younger-born principle, which 
exceeds that which Zeus embodied, just as Zeus had in 
his birth been a higher principle than the old reign con- 
tained; and Zeus is flung headlong, like Lucifer, into 
the abyss of past things. Thus Shelley, as is the uni- 
versal way of genius, had created a great work by 
fusing in it two divergent products of the human spirit 
— the Hellenic idea of a higher power superseding the 
lower, and the Christian idea that this power was one of 
non-resistance, of forgiveness, of love. The reign of 
love now begins in the poem: Prometheus is released and 
wedded with Asia, who stands for the spirit of nature, 
in which marriage is typified the union of the human 
soul with nature, the harmony of man and nature, and 
he shares in the millennium which is thus established on 
earth. 

At the end, you observe, the Titan Myth drops away; 
it does not appear in the last acts ; for in it there was no 
such completion of the Promethean faith as Shelley de- 
scribes. 



6o THE TORCH 

And here I might end the discussion of Shelley's 
handling of the myth; but I cannot refrain from direct- 
ing your attention to the marvelous power of the myth 
which could so blend the Greek and Christian genius, 
and contain the passion of the French Revolution 
issuing in the highest and most extreme forms of Chris- 
tian ethics — in non-resistance, that is, and in the for- 
giveness of enemies. I say nothing of the practical wis- 
dom of this doctrine; what is it, but the old verses? 

"But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever 
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other 
also:" 

but I desire that you should identify this wisdom with 
its moment of utterance. The French Revolution — 
the Revolution of the Terror and the block, of the 
burnt chateaux and the Napoleonic wars, was over and 
done with; Shelley, in whom its spirit burnt as the 
pure flame, had rejected its methods, while holding to 
its ideals. He had lifted it from a political to a moral 
cause: he had abandoned the sword as its Evangel, and 
he put persuasion in the place of force, and love in the 
place of hate, and the genius of victory which he invoked 
was the conversion of society by the stricken cheek 
and the lost cloak. The idea of humanity was the 
fountain of his thought and the armor of his argument. 
I will not refrain from saying that the idea of a suffer- 
ing humanity, which finds the path of progress in invin- 
cible opposition to the ruling gods of the hour in the faith 
in greater divinities to come, is properly crowned and 
consecrated by this doctrine, that patient forgiveness of 
the wrong is the essence of victory over it, and the sure 
road to its downfall. But the significance of such a myth 



THE TITAN MYTH 6i 

is not to be exhausted by one poet, or by one treatment; 
and in my next lecture I shall take up the work of Keats, 
Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, in interpreting life, as 
they conceived it, by the same formula. 

I have left myself a moment to bring forward two 
considerations which may prove suggestive. The first 
is the analogy between Hebrew and Greek myths in the 
point that whereas in Eden the eating of the fruit of the 
knowledge of good and evil, whereby man became as 
God, was the occasion of man's ills, so in the myth of 
Greece the sharing of men in the divine fire was the 
cause of the sorrows of civilization. The second is that 
in the drama of the Book of Job there is a strong likeness 
to the situation in Prometheus, in the point that there is 
no action, but only a passive suffering in the principal 
character; and that in this suffering there is a dissent 
from the wisdom of Divine ways; that Job holds to his 
integrity and faith in his own righteousness in the face 
of all disaster and all argument, in quite the Promethean 
spirit, obdurately; and that he has the Promethean faith 
in the issue. The situation lies in the verse: 

"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will 
maintain my ways before him." 

The dignity of the human soul is dramatically upheld 
at the great climax of Job's final assertion of his right- 
eousness; and the situation is solved only by the voice 
from the whirlwind declaring that as nature is a mystery, 
much more must human life find mystery as an element 
of its being. But in this great drama — one of the 
marvelous works of human genius — though there is the 
presence of unjust suffering, of human integrity, and of a 
final victory of the right — there is no such clear presen- 



62 THE TORCH 

tation of the idea and its operation, as is found in the 
Promethean legend — the idea formulated in this myth 
by the race out of its knowledge of its own life, not as 
a dramatic incident such as Job's, but as a pervading and 
constant law — the idea that the progress of man lies 
in an immortal suffering, an invincible endurance of the 
injustice of the present world, in anticipation of the ab- 
solute justice known only to the prophetic heart within. 
This idea is a natural product of man's reflection on his 
history, a natural interpretation of his experience; and 
he finds it imaginatively embodied in Prometheus more 
adequately and humanly than elsewhere. It has entered 
into thousands of lives in this century of the Revolution, 
with both illumination and courage; sharing in this idea, 
and the life which is led in obedience to it, the humblest 
of men shares in the sublimity of the great Titan. 



IV 

THE TITAN MYTH 

II 

The importance of history in literature can hardly be 
emphasized too much. I have not hesitated to speak of 
mythology and chivalry, and even of the Scriptures, as 
transformations of history, and of imaginative literature 
as the spiritual after-life both of historical events and 
conditions in the narrow sense, and of general human ex- 
perience in the broad sense. I have directed attention 
also to the influence of history in a more direct way, in 
the literature of the last century — to its inspirational 
power there; out of it came, in particular, the pictur- 
esqueness of the historical novel; and, inasmuch as the 
romantic spirit of the century explored all lands and 
times for new material, and eagerly absorbed all that 
travel or research brought forward new to the European 
mind, it naturally happened that the conception of his- 
torical humanity became one of rich variety; the formula 
— "many men, many minds^' — received unending illus- 
tration, and it might be thought that the result would 
have been to impress on the race a sense of hopeless di- 
versity in its members rather than of unbroken unity. 
But history had this inspirational power, not only in lit- 
erature, but in philosophy; the mind of man was stimu- 
lated to find in all this new mass of different detail a 
single principle that would explain and reconcile the ap- 

63 



64 THE TORCH 

parent confusion — to frame, that is, a philosophy of 
history. Herder, the German writer, was one of the 
most influential of the great men who attacked this prob- 
lem; he gave his Hfe to it. At the dawn of a new age, you 
know, there is often a singular phenomenon: men of 
genius arise, with a poetical cast of mind, and they are 
prophetic of the new day because they show forth some 
single idea or mood of it though they do not grasp the 
whole; they catch like morning clouds, some the red, 
some the gold, some the purple ray, but none of them 
gives that one white light which will prevail when the 
day is fully come. An outburst of poetry — the prev- 
alence of a poetical view of things — is the sign of an 
advance along the whole line. Herder was a man of 
this kind; and it is easy now to say that his method was 
imperfectly scientific, and that his imagination and desire 
led him astray. Nevertheless he had one of those minds 
which, if it does not build a system squared of solid 
timber, flings seeds on every wind like a living tree. 
His intellect was capacious, and in the attempt he made 
to include all things in his philosophizing he seems an 
anticipation of Herbert Spencer; in his theorizing, too, 
students find innumerable thoughts — that are half- 
guesses — which are almost the words of Darwin. He 
was, thus, you see, in the true path of advance; he 
caught the first gleams of the new hour of time. He was 
interested, over and above all else, in humanity and its 
destiny as disclosed in history. He saw in history the 
working of a law of beneficence and justice, which though 
it might not seem such when viewed in its means, always 
and unfailingly is such when viewed in its end; thus from 
the concourse and struggle of forces in civilization there 
is always issuing the slow triumph of reason. This was 



THE TITAN MYTH 65 

what Herder conceived as the law of progress; and is 
the view taken in his leading prose works, the ^'Ideas on 
the History of Mankind'' and the 'Tetters for the Fur- 
therance of Humanity/* which are still great and fruit- 
ful books. At the very end of a life spent thus in 
meditation on the career of man in civilization, Herder 
set forth his faith in the principle of progress in a series 
of dramatic scenes built out of the myth of Prometheus. 
He identified the fire which was the Titan's character- 
istic gift to mortals, as civilization, and saw in it the 
two- fold symbol — first, of the arts themselves, secondly, 
of that divine soul which restlessly excites and spurs on 
all the powers of man. 

I will sketch very briefly the story as Herder tells it. 
Prometheus has been long chained to the rock and (as 
in Shelley's poem) time has ripened and softened his 
heart, partly because he knows that his work is pros- 
pering among men. In the first scene he hears a distant 
song of victory, and voices announces to him that reason 
fructifies the earth. In later scenes, first the daughters 
of the Ocean and old Oceanus himself come complaining 
that mankind disturbs the sea with ships, changes the 
course of the waters by dams and canals, and brings 
the ends of the earth together with commerce; but 
Prometheus replies, prophesying: — 

"The sea which girds the earth shall be the mediator and 
peace-maker of the nations." 

Then the Dryads, daughters of the earth, come with a 
similar tale; but Prometheus tells them that in the end 
man will make a garden of the earth; and other mytho- 
logical characters enter, each with its tale, Ceres, the 
goddess of harvest, who works with man — and Bac- 



66 THE TORCH 

chus, the giver of the vine ; at last Hercules and Theseus 
release the Titan, all go before Themis, the goddess of 
justice who judges the cause between Prometheus and 
the gods, and gives the decision for Prometheus. Pallas 
then leads to Prometheus Agatia, the pure spirit of hu- 
manity, and the drama ends. You see the work is little 
more than a series of picturesque classical tableaux, in 
which the victory of man through reason is set forth 
with a maintenance of self-sacrifice, perseverance, pa- 
tience, social labor and love as the essential elements of 
the moral ideal. 

A few years before, Schlegel had produced a Prome- 
theus in the form of a poem, in tlie same realm of his- 
tory but with much less scenic elaboration. In it he 
describes the Golden Age before the Titan War, the deso- 
late state of man after Zeus came to the throne, and 
how Prometheus made of clay a new race, and animated 
the clay with the heavenly fire. Themis reproves him 
for this act, and foretells the sorrows of this Promethean 
man — this being of divine desire chained to the earth 
and tyrannized over by the thought of the past and of 
the future alike. But Prometheus believes, he says, 
that good will not die, that the toil of one generation will 
help the next, that human will reduces life to order and 
human action subdues nature; and that out of the midst 
of opposing principles civilization grows to more and 
more. The law of progress is stated with sure opti- 
mism: though there may be ages of terror and apparent 
degeneration, yet the immortal principle of good in the 
race is such that it passes invulnerable through all his- 
tory, and accomplishes the work of civilization. The 
poem is no more than a reply to the sad prophecy of 
Themis, and perhaps incidentally to such reactionaries 



THE TITAN MYTH 67 

as saw in the Reign of Terror and the Revolution 
generally the denial of progress and of the social ideal. 
But in the sphere of history, one of the latest rework- 
ings of the myth, the Prometheus of Quinet, the French 
poet, contains the most interesting variation. He con- 
ceived firmly the unity of history; and in obedience to 
this conception he endeavored to unite the Greek myth 
with Christianity, not ethically as Shelley did, but his- 
torically. ^'If Prometheus" — he says in his preface — 
"is the eternal prophet, as his name indicates, each new 
age of humanity can put new oracles in the mouth of the 
Titan. Perhaps there is no character so well fitted to 
express the feelings — the premature and half melan- 
choly desires — in which our age is enchained." In this 
spirit he wrote a drama in three parts: the first depicts 
the creation of man by Prometheus, the gift of fire — 
that is, the soul — and the beginning of life in sorrow. 
The second part depicts the suffering of Prometheus on 
Caucasus, in which the foreknowledge of the fall of 
Zeus becomes a prophecy of Christ's coming. The 
third act depicts the advent of Christianity. The Arch- 
angels, Raphael and Michael descend on Caucasus, and 
release Prometheus, who rises transfigured; the gods of 
Olympus prostrate themselves before him and the angels, 
and pray in vain for life. Then Prometheus has a singu- 
lar thought which to me is the most dramatic in the 
play: as he listens to the death-song of the gods, his mind 
is clouded with a doubt — will not the new divinity also 
pass away? — and does he not already see a new Cauca- 
sus before him in the distant time? — will he not be 
bound again? — The angels comfort him, and he ascends 
to heaven; but as he disappears in that hierarchy of celes- 
tial peace and love, he still wears the shadow of thought 



68 THE TORCH 

— for he remembers that on earth men still suffer. This 
attempt at a true synthesis of the Greek and Christian 
imagination — in behalf of the unity of history — is a 
most interesting illustration of the spirit of the century; 
which was on the whole a century of peace-making be- 
tween the great historic elements of spiritual civilization, 
a drawing together and harmonizing of religions, philos- 
ophies and half-developed and fragmentary doctrines, by 
virtue of the identical principle they contain; or as Herder 
said, in consequence of that symmetry of human reason 
which makes all nobler minds tend to think the same 
thoughts. 

Interesting as the historical point of view is, it is plain 
that the myth loses something of its poetical quality, be- 
comes pure allegory, becomes almost mechanical; it be- 
comes, in fact, what is called poetical machinery, a hard 
and fast means of figurative expression. The characters 
in Herder and Schlegel move like marionettes, and you 
hear the voice of the author apart from his work. Let us 
turn to a mind in which the myth really was alive again, 
with creative as well as expressive power — the mind of 
Keats. In his "Hyperion," the tale is of the Titans im- 
mediately after their overthrow; they have been de- 
throned from power, Saturn is an exile hiding in the 
deep glens, but their ruin is still incomplete; Hyperion 
still is lord in the sun, and the others are at liberty to 
gather for a great council. In order to display the idea of 
Keats, let me approach it indirectly. The point of view 
which he takes has much affinity with science — more, 
that is, than with either history or ethics. Modern the- 
ories of evolution have accustomed our minds to the 
conception of an original state of the universe, vast, 
homogeneous, undiversified, simple; out of this — to 



THE TITAN MYTH 69 

adopt the nebular theory — slowly great masses con- 
glomerated, gathered into sun and planets; and out of 
these arose finally living things on a smaller scale but of 
higher perfection of being. Now if you will think of 
man's progressive conceptions of the divinity as some- 
thing similar to this, as parallel to it, you will have 
Keats's idea. In the beginning were the vast, vague, un- 
defined, half-unconscious beings, like Uranus, the heav- 
ens, and Gaia, the earth, and Chronos, time; to them 
succeeded the more conscious and half-humanized brood 
of the Titans, like the sun and planets, as it were; last 
came the gods of Olympus, in the perfection of full hu- 
manity, and on the physical scale of man in form, feature 
and spirit. The change from the Titanic to the Olym- 
pian rule, was like the change from one geological age of 
vast forms of brute and vegetable life to another of smaller 
but nobler species. The higher principle displaces the 
lower, according to that Greek idea of progress which I 
have described; and this successive displacement of the 
lower by the higher is the law of development in the 
Universe. 

In Keats's poem, Oceanus, speaking to the Titans in 
council as the wisest of them all, sets forth the matter 
plainly, and I should like you to notice how the concep- 
tion of a progressive order in nature (not as hitherto in 
civilization merely) and the conception of the necessity 
of accepting truth, bear the mark of the scientific spirit. 
Oceanus thus speaks: — 

"We fall by course of Nature's law, not force 
Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou 
Hast sifted well the atom-universe; 
But for this reason, that thou art the King, 
And only blind from sheer supremacy, 



70 THE TORCH 

One avenue was shaded from thine eyes, 

Through which I wander'd to eternal truth. 

And first, as thou wast not the first of powers, 

So art thou not the last ; it cannot be, 

Thou art not the beginning nor the end. 

From chaos and parental darkness came 

Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil. 

That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends 

Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came. 

And with it light, and light, engendering 

Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd 

The whole enormous matter into life. 

Upon that very hour, our parentage. 

The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest: 

Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race, 

Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. 

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 't is pain; 

O folly! for to bear all naked truths. 

And to envisage circumstance, all calm, 

That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! 

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far 

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; 

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth 

In form and shape compact and beautiful. 

In will, in action free, companionship. 

And thousand other signs of purer life; 

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 

A power more strong in beauty, born of us 

And fated to excel us, as we pass 

In glory that old Darkness : nor are we 

Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule 

Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil 

Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed 

And feedeth still, more comely than itself? 

Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? 

Or shall the tree be envious of the dove 

Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings 

To wander wherewithal and find its joys? 

We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs 



THE TITAN MYTH 71 

Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, 
But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower 
Above us in their beauty, and must reign 
In right thereof; for 't is the eternal law 
That first in beauty should be first in might: 
Yea, by that law, another race may drive 
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now. 
Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, 
My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face? 
Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along 
By noble winged creatures he hath made? 
I saw him on the calmed waters scud. 
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes, 
That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewell 
To all my empire; farewell sad I took. 
And hither came, to see how dolorous fate 
Had wrought upon ye, and how I might best 
Give consolation in this woe extreme. 
Receive the truth, and let it be your balm." 

It appears, then, that the new principle of being, in 
whose advent lay the ruin of the old world, is beauty. 

" 'T is the eternal law 
That first in beauty should be first in might." 

This is, as you know, Keats's distinctive mark — the per- 
ception and adoration of beauty. What love was to 
Shelley, that beauty was to Keats — the open door to 
divinity; he saw life as a form of beauty. And he means 
what he says — not that beauty has strength as an added 
quality, but that beauty is strength, and reigns in its own 
right. This rise of the Olympians was beauty's moment 
of birth in the minds of men; this birth was a revelation, 
like a new religion, and it is presented as such by Keats 
in a two-fold way. First it is a revelation to the Titans. 
You have seen how Oceanus on beholding the new god 



72 THE TORCH 

of the sea, gave up the rule over it. So Clymene, who 
describes herself — 

"O Father, I am here the simplest voice" — 

tells her experience: 

"I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore, 
Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land 
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers. 
Full of calm joy it was,| as I of grief; 
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth ; 
So that I felt a movement in my heart 
To chide, and to reproach that solitude 
With songs of misery, music of our woes; 
And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell 
And murmur'd into it, and made melody — 

melody no more! for while I sang, 
And with poor skill let pass into the breeze 
The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand 
Just opposite, an island of the sea, 

There came enchantment with the shifting wind, 
That did both drown and keep alive my ears. 

1 threw my shell away upon the sand, 
And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fiU'd 
With that new blissful golden melody. 

A living death was in each gush of sounds, 

Each family of rapturous hurried notes. 

That fell, one after one, yet all at once. 

Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string: 

And then another, then another strain. 

Each like a dove leaving its olive perch, 

With music wing'd instead of silent plumes 

To hover round my head, and make me sick 

Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame. 

And I was stopping up my frantic ears. 

When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands, 

A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune, 

And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo! 

The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!' 

I fled, it follow'd me, and cried, 'Apollo!' " 



THE TITAN MYTH 73 

Beauty is also a revelation to the gods themselves in 
their own bosoms where it has sprung into life. The pas- 
sage in which Apollo's awakening is described — full 
of a poet's personal touches of his own experience in 
coming into possession of himself — is one of the most 
impassioned in all Keats 's writing: 

"Together had he left his mother fair 
And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower, 
And in the morning twilight wandered forth 
Beside the osiers of a rivulet, 
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale. 
The nightingale had ceas'd, and a few stars 
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush 
Began calm- throated. Throughout all the isle 
There was no covert, no retired cave 
Unhaunted by the numerous noise of waves. 
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. 
He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears 
Went trickling down the golden bow he held. 
Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood, 
While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by 
With solemn step an awful Goddess came, 
And there was purport in her looks for him. 
Which he with eager guess began to read 
Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said: 
'How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea? 
Or hath that antique mien and robed form 
Mov'd in these vales invisible till now? 
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er 
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone 
In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced 
The rustle of those ample skirts about 
These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers 
Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass'd. 
Goddess ! I have beheld those eyes before. 
And their eternal calm, and, all that face, 
Or I have dream'd.' — 'Yes,* said the supreme shape, 



74 THE TORCH 

Thou hast dream'd of me ; and awaking up 

Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side, 

Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast 

Unwearied ear of the whole universe 

Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth 

Of such new tuneful wonder. Is 't not strange 

That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth, 

What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad 

When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs 

To one who in this lonely isle hath been 

The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life, 

From the young day when first thy infant hand 

Pluck'd witless the weak flowers, till thine arm 

Could bend that bow heroic to all times. 

Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power 

Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones 

For prophecies of thee, and for the sake 

Of loveliness new-born.' — Apollo then, 

With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes. 

Thus answer'd, while his white melodious throat 

Throbb'd with the syllables: — 'Mnemosyne! 

Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how; 

Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest? 

Why should I strive to show what from thy lips 

Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark. 

And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes: 

I strive to search wherefor I am so sad. 

Until a melancholy numbs my limbs; 

And then upon the grass I sit, and moan. 

Like one who once had wings. — O why should I 

Feel curs'd and thwarted, when the liegeless air 

Yields to my step aspirant? why should I 

Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet? 

Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing: 

Are there not other regions than this isle? 

What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun! 

And the most patient brilliance of the moon! 

And stars by thousands! Point me out the way 

To any one particular beauteous star, 



THE TITAN MYTH 75 

And I will flit into it with my lyre, 

And make its silvery splendor pant with bliss 

I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power? 

Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity 

Makes this alarum in the elements, 

While I here idle listen on the shores 

In fearless yet in aching ignorance? 

O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp, 

That waileth every morn and eventide, 

Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves ! 

Mute thou remainest. — Mute ! yet I can read 

A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: 

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. 

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, 

Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, 

Creations and destroyings all at once 

Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, 

And deify me, as if some blithe wine 

Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, 

And so become immortal/ — Thus the God, 

While his enkindled eyes, with level glance 

Beneath his white soft temples, steadfast kept 

Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne. 

Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush 

All the immortal fairness of his limbs; 

Most like the struggle at the gate of death ; 

Or liker still to one who should take leave 

Of pale immortal death, and with a pang 

As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse 

Die into life: so young Apollo anguish 'd; 

His very hair, his golden tresses famed 

Kept undulation round his eager neck. 

During the pain Mnemosyne upheld 

Her arms as one who prophesied. — At length 

Apollo shriek'd; — and lo! from all his limbs 

Celestial. ..." 

The birth-cry of Apollo was the death-cry of Keats: 
there the golden pen fell from his hands, and the poem 
i — a fragment — ends. 



76 THE TORCH 

There is one detail in Keats's work, which though it is 
subsidiary, deserves mention because it completes the 
reality of the Titan Myth in an important way. In all the 
other writers, whom I have named, you do not get any 
idea of the Titans physically, you do not see them as Ti- 
tans. In Shelley, and the rest, Prometheus is essentially 
a man; he has human proportion; in Keats Prometheus 
does not appear at all. But Keats has realized the Ti- 
tanic figures to the imagination as distinct and noble 
forms; they have the massiveness of limb and immobil- 
ity of feature that we associate with Egyptian art, with 
the Sphinxes and the Memnons; yet each is charac- 
terized differently; Saturn, Oceanus, Enceladus, Thea, 
Mnemosyne are individualized, and especially Hyperion 
is set forth, in ways of grandeur. The subject would 
require more illustration than I can now give it; but let 
me cite the very remarkable figure which is found in the 
second version of ^'Hyperion," a version that is as full of 
Dante as the first one is of Milton. The figure is that of 
Moneta, the solitary and ageless priestess of the temple 
of the Titans, "sole goddess of its desolation," who gives 
the poet the vision of the past. 

"And yet I had a terror of her robes, 
And chiefly of the veils that from her brow 
Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries, 
That made my heart too small to hold its blood. 
This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand 
Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face, 
Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd 
By an immortal sickness which kills not; 
It works a constant change, which happy death 
Can put no end to ; deathwards progressing 
To no death was that visage; it had past 
The lily and the snow; and beyond these 



THE TITAN MYTH 77 

I must not think now, though I saw that face. 

But for her eyes I should have fled away; 

They held me back with a benignant light, 

Soft, mitigated by divinest lids 

Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd 

Of all external things; they saw me not. 

But in blank splendor beam'd like the mild moon, 

Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not 

What eyes are upward cast." 

A similar imaginative power to that shown here per- 
vades Keats's conceptions of the Titans, and distin- 
guishes his work from all others as a creation in the vis- 
ible world of the imagination such as is not elsewhere to 
be found. Here only is the Titan world made nobly real. 
I fear to weary you with this long catalogue of the va- 
rious modern forms of the Titan Myth, but it is neces- 
sary to develop the theme. I must say at least a word 
about Goethe's "Prometheus." It is only a brief frag- 
ment of a drama, and belongs to his youth. He was but 
twenty-four when he experimented with it. In the scenes 
which we possess, Prometheus is the maker of the clay 
images to which he gives life by the aid of Pallas — that 
is, really, by his own intelligence. He launches them as 
men in the career of civilization by declaring to them the 
principle of property; he tells one to build a house, and 
to the question whether it will be for the man himself or 
for everybody, Prometheus answers it shall be the man's 
own private possession and dwelling; he declares also 
the principle of retaliatory justice, saying on the occa- 
sion of the first theft, that he whose hand is against every 
one, every one's hand shall be against him; and he an- 
nounces the fact and meaning of the first death. The 
drama does not proceed further. Its significance lies in 
two points; in the first place it is easy to see in Prome- 



78 THE TORCH 

theus's attitude toward his clay images and his lan- 
guage about them a reflection of the young poet's own 
state of mind toward the mental beings whom he creates 
— a reflection, that is, of the pride and glory of genius in 
imaginary creation. Secondly, and more importantly, 
the drama exhibits the intense desire of the young 
Goethe for complete individual independence. In the 
answer Prometheus makes to the messenger of Zeus, who 
remonstrates with him, the central point is that Prome- 
theus feels he is a god like Zeus, and wants freedom to 
do his will in his own realm as Zeus does in Olympus. 
Let Zeus keep his own, and let me keep my own, he 
says; he would rather his clay images should never live 
than be subjects of Zeus, for being still unborn, they are 
still free; liberty is the true good, and men, made by him, 
shall be embodiments of his own independent spirit. In 
all this is the prophecy of Goethe's own life. To me 
Goethe is the type of the man who wants to be let alone; 
and he accomplished his desire in a supremely selfish tran- 
quillity, in which he used life to develop himself, sacri- 
ficed all things to himself, was at once the model and 
the condemnation of self-culture so pursued. In his 
young Prometheus there is this impatient cry for indi- 
vidual liberty, as a basis of life; and I discern little else 
significant in it. I must also spare a word for Victor 
Hugo's ^Titan." The poem is in the ''Legend of the 
Ages." This Titan is not Prometheus, or any other in- 
dividual Titan, but is all of them in one, the giant, con- 
ceived as one. He is, of course, mankind — earth-born 
man, conceived as in scientific history, burrowing his 
way out of the planet itself — a massive medieval crea- 
ture, gross and violent, tearing his path through cave 
and grotto, till at last he emerges and sees the stars. 



THE TITAN MYTH 79 

This giant is clearly a symbol of man rising from his 
crude earthliness of nature and barbaric ages up to the 
sight and knowledge of the heavenly world. It is a 
type of progress, as science and history jointly conceive 
the evolution of humanity. 

I have sufficiently illustrated how the Titan Myth in 
its variety has been employed to embody and express the 
idea of a progressive humanity in many aspects as it has 
appeared to different poets. The idea of progress is in 
our civilization a continuing and universal idea; and 
Prometheus is a continuing and universal image of its 
nature — the race-image of a race-idea. The Prome- 
thean situation is inherent in the law of human progress, 
however viewed, whether historically or scientifically or 
ethically, or in any other way. Emerson says 

"The fiend that man harries, 
Is Love of the Best." 

The dream of this Best, and the will to bring it down to 
earth — the struggle with the temporary ruling worse 
that is in the world and must be dethroned — the proud 
and resolute suffering of all that such a present world 
can inflict — the faith in the final victory, are the Pro- 
methean characteristics; but the human spirit, in the 
nature of the case, must forever be in bonds; its succes- 
sive liberations are partial only, and in the disclosure of 
a forever fairer dream in the future, lies also the dis- 
closure of new bonds, for the present is always a state of 
chains in view of the to-morrow; and for man there is 
always to-morrow. The great words that seem the keys 
of progress, such as reason, love, beauty, are only sym- 
bols of an infinite series in life — a series that never ends. 
Such is the abstract statement that progress involves the 



8o THE TORCH 

idea of humanity as a Promethean sufferer. But the 
race, which requires picturesque and vivid images of its 
highest faith, hope and thought, comes to its poets, Kke 
the human child, and says ever and ever — "Tell me a 
story : tell me a story about myself." And the poet tells 
the race a new story about itself — like the mother of 
Marius when she told him of "the white bird which he 
must bear in his bosom across the crowded market-place 

— his soul." Each poet tells this new story to the child 
about itself — a story it did not know before, and the 
child believes the story and increases knowledge and life 
with it. The question the race asks, in this Myth, is 
"what is most divine in me?" "What is the god in me?" 

— and Shelley answers, it is all-enduring and all-for- 
giving love toward all ; and Herder answ^ers that it is rea- 
son, Keats that it is beauty, Goethe that it is liberty, and 
Hugo that it is immense triumphant toil; and each in 
giving his answer tells the story of the old gods and the 
younger gods, and the wdse Titan who knew yet other 
gods that should come. And the race listens to these 
tales because it hears in them its own voice speaking. 
Men of genius are men, like other men; but their genius, 
if I may use an obvious comparison, is like the reflector 
in front of the light-house flame — in all directions but 
one it is a common flame, but in that one direction along 
which the reflector magnifies, glorifies and speeds its 
radiance, it is the shining of a great light. Look at 
men of genius, as you find them in biography, and they 
seem ordinary persons of daily affairs; but if you can 
catch sight of genius through that side which is turned 
out to the infinite as to a great ocean, you will see, I will 
not say the man himself, but the use God makes of the 
man. That use is to reveal ourselves to ourselves, to 



THE TITAN MYTH 8i 

show what human nature is and can do, to unlock our 
minds, our hearts, all our energies, for use. We admire 
and love such men because they are more ourselves than 
we are, the undeveloped, often unknown selves that in us 
are but partially born. "What is most divine in me?" 
is the question the race puts; and perhaps it is true 
(though the statement may be startling), that as soon 
as man discovers a god in himself, all external gods fall 
from their thrones — and this is the meaning of the 
myth. But again, what is this but the old verse — 

"The kingdom of heaven is within you?" 

That realized, the old gods may go their ways. It is 
realized, perhaps, for one of its modes, in this way: 
that as the being of beauty is entire and perfect in 
the grass that flourishes for a summer, or in the rose 
of dawn that fades even while it blossoms, so the power 
of moral ideas enters, entire and perfect, into our being, 
and, as I said, the humblest of men suffering for man's 
good as he conceives it shares in the moral sublimity 
of Prometheus. What is thus within man — the thing 
that is most divine — is certainly the medium by which 
man approaches the divinity, and through which he 
beholds it, in any living way. It belongs to Puritanism, 
as a mood of mind, to be impatient of any external 
thing between the soul and the divinity; it will have 
the least of any such material element in its spiritual 
sight and communion; it sees God by an inner vision. 
Mediums of some sort there must be between human 
nature and its idea of the divine; and it seems to me 
that our inner vision by which the Puritan spirit reaches 
outward and upward is the vision of imagination trans- 
figuring history to saints and martyrs in their holy living 



82 THE TORCH 

and holy dying, transfiguring all human experience to the 
idealities of poetry. Mankind seeing itself more per- 
fect in St. Francis, in Philip Sidney, in all men of spir- 
itual genius, makes them a part of this inner vision — 
and, rank over rank, above them the perfection of 
Arthur and Parsifal, and still more high the perfection 
of reason, beauty, and love in their element. In this 
hierarchy of human daring, dreaming, desiring is the 
only beatific vision that human eyes ever immediately 
beheld — the vision of what is most divine in man. 
What I maintain is that, humanly speaking, in the search 
for God one path by which the race moves on is through 
this inner vision of ideal perfections in its own nature 
and its own experience, which it has fixed and illuminated 
in these imaginative figures, these race-images of race- 
ideas. 



V 

SPENSER 

The general principle which I have endeavored to set 
forth in the first four lectures is that mankind in the 
process of civilization stores up race-power, in one or an- 
other form, so that it is a continually growing fund; and 
that literature, pre-eminently, is such a store of spiritual 
race-power, derived originally from the historical life or 
from the general experience of men, and transformed by 
imagination so that all which is not necessary falls away 
from it and what is left is truth in its simplest, most vivid 
and vital form. Thus I instanced mythology, chivalry, 
and the Scriptures as three such sifted deposits of the 
past; and I illustrated the use poetry makes of such race- 
images and race-ideas by the example of the myth of the 
Titans. In the remaining four lectures I desire to ap- 
proach the same general principle of the storing of race- 
power from the starting-point of the individual author 
— to set forth Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley, 
not in their personality but as race-exponents, and 
to show that their essential greatness and value are due 
to the degree in which they availed themselves of the 
race-store. You may remember that I defined education 
for all men as the process of identifying oneself with the 
race-mind, entering into and taking possession of the 
race-store; and the rule is the same for men of genius as 
for other men. You find, consequently, that the greatest 
poets have always been the best scholars of their times 

83 



84 THE TORCH 

— not in the encyclopedic sense that they knew every- 
thing, but in the sense that tliey possessed the hving 
knowledge of their age, so far as it concerns the human 
soul in its history. They have always possessed what is 
called the academic mind — that is, they had a strong 
grasp on literary tradition and the great thoughts of 
mankind, and the great forms which those thoughts had 
taken on in the historic imagination. Virgil is a striking 
example of such a poet, perfectly cultivated in all the ar- 
tistic, philosophic, literary tradition as it then was: 
Dante and Chaucer are similar instances; and, in Eng- 
lish, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley and Tennyson con- 
tinue the line of those poets in whom scholarship — the 
academic tradition — is an essential element in their 
worth. It ought not to be necessary to bring this out so 
clearly; for it is obvious that men of genius, in the proc- 
ess of absorbing the race-store, by the very fact become 
scholarly men, men of intellectual culture, though in 
consequence of their genius they neglect all culture ex- 
cept that which still has spiritual life in it. This is so 
elementary a truth in literature that the index to the im- 
portance of an author is often his representative power 
■ — the degree to which he sums up and delivers the hu- 
man past. How large a tract of time, what extent of 
knowledge, what range of historical emotion — does his 
mind drain? These are initial questions. And in lite- 
rary history, you know, there are here and there minds, 
so central to the period, such meeting points of different 
ages and cultures, that they resemble those junctions on 
a railway map which seem to absorb all geography into 
their own black dots. The greatest poets are just such 
centers of spiritual history; where ancient and modern 
meet, where classicism and medievalism, Christianity 



SPENSER 85 

and paganism, Renaissance and Reformation and Rev- 
olution meet — there is the focus, for the time being, of 
the soul of man ; and it is at that point that genius devel- 
ops its transcendent power. 

Spenser was such a mind. I spoke in the first lecture 
of that law of progress which involves the passing away 
of a civilization at the moment of its perfection and the 
death of that breed of men who have brought it to its 
height. Spenser was the poet of a dying race and a dying 
culture; in his work there is reflected and embodied a 
climax in the spiritual life of humanity to which imagi- 
nation gives form, beauty, and passion. In this respect 
I am always reminded of Virgil when I read him; for 
Virgil used, like Spenser, the romanticism of a receding 
past to express his sense of human life, and he was re- 
lated to his materials in much the same way. The Myth 
of Arthur lay behind Spenser as the Myth of Troy lay 
behind Virgil in the mist of his country's origins; the 
Italians of the Renaissance, Ariosto, and Tasso, were a 
school for Spenser much as the Alexandian poets had 
been for Virgil ; and as in Virgil mythology and Homeric 
heroism and the legend of the antique Italian land be- 
fore Rome blended in one, and became the last flower- 
ing of the pre-Christian world in what is, perhaps, the 
greatest of all world-poems, the "^neid," so in Spenser 
chivalry, medievalism and the new birth of learning in 
Europe blended, and gave us a world-poem of the Chris- 
tian soul, in which medieval spirituality — as it seems 
to me — expired. Spenser resembled Virgil, too, in his 
moment; he was endeavoring to create for England a 
poem such as Italy possessed in Ariosto's and Tasso's 
epics, to introduce into his country's literature the most 
supreme poetic art then in the world, just as Virgil 



86 THE TORCH 

was attempting to instill into the Roman genius the im- 
aginative art of Greece. He resembled Virgil again in 
his poetic education inasmuch as he formed his powers 
and first exercised them in pastoral verse, in the 
"Shepheard's Calendar'' as Virgil did in his ''Eclogues"; 
and he resembled Virgil still more importantly in that 
his theme was the greatest known to him — namely, 
the empire of the soul, as Virgil's was the empire of 
Rome. Spenser, then, when he came to his work is 
to be looked on as a master of all literary learning, a 
pioneer and planter of poetic art in his own country, 
and a poet who used the world of the receding past as 
his means of expressing what was most real to him in 
human life. 

The work by which he is remembered is "The Faerie 
Queene," and in it all that I have said meets you at the 
threshold. Perhaps the first, and certainly the abiding 
impression the poem makes, is of its remoteness from 
life. Remoteness, you know, is said to be a necessary 
element in any artistic effect — such as you feel in look- 
ing at Greek statues or Italian Madonnas or French 
landscapes. This remoteness of the artistic world the 
poem has, in large measure: its country is no physical 
region known to geography, but is that land of the plain 
where Knights are always pricking, of forests and 
streams and hills that have no element of composition, 
and especially of a horizon like the sea's, usually lonely, 
but where anything may appear at any time: it is a 
land like a dream; and what takes place there at any 
moment is pictorial, and can be painted. But the quality 
of remoteness, so noticeable in the poem and to which I 
refer, is not that of artistic atmosphere and setting. It 
arises largely from the remoteness of history in the poem. 



SPENSER 87 

felt in the constant presence of outworn things, of by- 
gone characters, ways and incidents; and the im- 
pression of intricacy that the poem also makes at first, 
the sense of confusion in it, is partly due to this same 
presence of the unfamiliar in most heterogeneous variety. 
This miscellaneousness is the result of Spenser's com- 
prehensive inclusion in the poem of all he knew, that is, 
of the entire literary tradition of the race within his 
ken. Thus you find, at the outset, Aristotle's scheme of 
the moral virtues, and Plato's doctrine of the unity of 
beauty and wisdom, on the philosophical side; and for 
imagery out of the classics, here are Pluto, Proserpina, 
and Night, the house of Morpheus, the bleeding tree, 
the cloud that envelops the fallen warrior and allows 
him to escape, the journey in Hades, the story of Hip- 
polytus, and fauns, satyrs and other minor mythologi- 
cal beings. You find, also, out of medieval things, the 
method of the poem which is the characteristic medieval 
method of allegory, and in imagery dragons, giants, 
dwarfs, the hermit, the magician, the dungeon, the wood 
of error, the dream of Arthur, the holy wells, the Sara- 
cen Knights, the House of Pride, the House of Holi- 
ness, and many more; and, in these lists, I have cited 
instances only from the first of the six books. A similar 
rich variety of matter is to be found, consisting of the 
characteristic belongings of Renaissance fable. This 
multiplicity of imaginative detail, being as it is a sum- 
mary of all the poetical knowledge of previous time, is 
perplexing to a reader unfamiliar with the literature 
before Spenser, and makes the poem seem really, and not 
merely artistically remote. Here appears most clearly 
the fact which I emphasize, that the "Faerie Queene" de- 
picts and contains a receding world, a dying culture; for 



88 THE TORCH 

it is to be borne in mind that to Spenser and his early 
readers these things were not then so remote; medieval- 
ism was as near to him as Puritanism is to us, and the 
thoughts, methods, aims, language and imagery of the 
Renaissance as near as the Revolution is to us. In that 
age, too, chivalry yet lingered, at least as a spectacle, 
and other materials in the poem that now seem to us 
like stage-machinery were part and parcel of real life. 
The tourney was still a game of splendid pleasure and 
display at the Court of Elizabeth; the masque-proces- 
sion, so constant in one or another form in the poem, was 
a fashion of Christmas mummery, of the Court Masque, 
and of city processions; the physical aspect and furni- 
ture of the poem were, thus, not wholly antiquated ; and 
on the side of character, it is easy to read between the 
lines the presence of Spenser's own noble friends — and 
no one in that age was richer in noble friendship — the 
presence, I mean, of the just Lord Grey, the adventurous 
Raleigh, and the high-spirited Philip Sidney. The ele- 
ment of historical remoteness must, therefore, be thought 
of as originally much less strong than now, and one which 
the passage of time has imported into the poem very 
largely. 

We are, perhaps, too apt to think that our own age is 
one in which great heterogenousness of knowledge, of 
thought and principle and faith, is a distinctive trait; 
but we are not the first to find our race-inheritance a 
confusion of riches, and a tentative eclecticism the best 
we can compass in getting a philosophy of our own. 
Every learned and open mind, in the times of the flowing 
together of the world's ideas, has the same experience. 
Spenser, being a receptive mind and standing at the 
center of the ideas of the world then^ was necessarily 



SPENSER 89 

overwhelmed with the variety of his knowledge; but he 
faced the same problem that Milton, Gray, Shelley, and 
Tennyson in their time met; the problem of how to re- 
duce this miscellaneousness of matter to some order, to 
reconcile it with his own mind, to build up out of it his 
own world. It is the same problem that confronts each 
one of us, in education; in the presence of this race- 
inheritance, so vast, so apparently contradictory and 
diverse — how to take possession of it, to make it ours 
vitally, to have it enter into and take possession of us. 
Spenser is an admirable example of this situation, for in 
his poem the opposition between the race-mind and the 
individual is clearly brought out in the point that he con- 
verges all this imagery, knowledge and method in order 
to set forth the individual's life. Spenser states his 
purpose in the preface: "The general end," he says, ''of 
all the Book is to fashion a gentleman, or noble person, 
in vertuous and gentle discipline." It is the very 
problem before each of us in education: "to fashion a 
gentleman." Spenser's plan, in portraying how this is 
to be done, is a very simple one. By a gentleman he 
means a man of Christian virtue, perfected in all the 
graces and the powers of human nature. The educa- 
tion required is an education in the development of the 
virtues, as he named them — Holiness, Temperance, 
Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy; he illustrates 
the development of each virtue, one in each Knight, and 
sends each Knight forth on an adventure in the course 
of which the Knight meets and overcomes the character- 
istic temptations of the virtue which he embodies. 
This was the plan of the poem, which, however, the poet 
found it easier to formulate than to follow with precision. 
The main fact stands out, however, that Spenser used 



90 THE TORCH 

all his resources of knowledge and art, miscellaneous 
as they were, for the single purpose of showing how the 
soul comes to moral perfection in the Christian world. 
You see there is nothing contemporary or remote or 
by-gone in the problem: that is universal and unchang- 
ing; but in answering it Spenser used an imaginative 
language that to many of us is like a lost tongue. Shall 
we, then, let the allegory go, as Lowell advised, content 
that it does not bite us, as he says? I cannot bring 
myself to second that advice. Though I am as fond 
of the idols of poetry for their own sake as any one, yet 
I have room for idols of morality and philosophy also 
— let us have as many idols as we can get, is my way: 
and to leave out of our serious-minded Spenser what was 
to the poet himself the core of his meaning — its spir- 
ituality — is too violent a measure, and bespeaks such 
desperate dullness in the allegory as I do not find in it. 
To read the poem for the beauty of its surface, and to 
let the noble substance go, is, at all events, not the way 
to understand it as a focus of race-elements and a store 
of race-power, as a poem not of momentary delight, but 
of historical phases of knowledge, culture and aspira- 
tion, a poem of the thoughtful human spirit brooding 
over its long inheritance of beauty, honor, and virtue. 

Of course, I cannot in an hour convey much of an 
idea of so great a poem, so various in its loveliness, so 
profound in significance, so diversified in merely literary 
interest. I shall make no attempt to tell its picturesque 
and wandering story, to describe its characters, or to ex- 
plain what marvelous lives they led in that old world of 
romance. But I shall try to show, in general terms, cer- 
tain aspects of it as a poem that presents life in a uni- 
versal, vital, and never- to-be-antiquated way, such as it 



SPENSER 91 

seemed to one of the most noble-natured of English- 
men, in a great age of human effort, thought and ac- 
complishment. 

Among the primary images under which life has been 
figured, none is more universal and constant than that 
into which the idea of travel enters. To all men at all 
times life has been a voyage, a pilgrimage, a quest. 
Spenser conceived of it as the quest, the peculiar image 
of chivalry, but not as the quest for the Grail or any 
other shadowy symbol on the attainment of which the 
quest was ended in a mystic solution. The quest of his 
Knights is for self-mastery; and it is achieved at each 
forward step of the journey. You remember that in the 
lecture on Prometheus I illustrated the way in which 
man takes a certain part of his nature — the evil prin- 
ciple — and places it outside of himself, calls it Mephis- 
topheles, and so deals with it artistically; in Spenser, the 
temptation which each Knight is under is his worser 
self, as we say, so taken and placed outside as his enemy 
whom he overcomes; thus, Guyon, the Knight of Tem- 
perance, overcomes the various forms of anger, of 
avarice, and of voluptuousness, which are merely, in 
fact, his other and worser selves; in each victory he 
gathers strength for the next encounter, and so ends 
perfecting himself in that yirtue. Life — that is to say, 
the quest — has a goal in self-mastery, that is progres- 
sively reached by the Knight at each new stage of his 
struggle. The atmosphere of life — so conceived as a 
spiritual warfare — is broadly rendered; it is, for ex- 
ample, always a thing of danger, and this element is 
given through the changing incident, the deceits prac- 
tised on the Knights, the troubles they fall into, often 
unwittingly, and undeservedly, their constant need to be 



92 THE TORCH 

vigilant and to receive succor. The secret, the false, the 
insidious, are as often present as is the warfare of the 
open foe. Again, this life is a thing of mystery. How- 
ever clear we may try to make life, however positive in 
mind we are and armed against illusions, it still remains 
true that mystery envelops life. I do not mean the 
mystery of thought, of the unknown, but the mystery of 
life itself. Spenser conceives this mystery as the action, 
friendly or inimical, of a spiritual v/orld round about 
man, a supernatural world; and he renders it by means 
of enchantment. I dare say that to most readers the 
presence of enchantment, both evil and good, is a hin- 
drance to the appreciation of the poem and impairs its 
reality to their minds. Arthur, you know, has a veiled 
shield; but its bared radiance will overthrow of itself any 
foe. This seems like an unfair advantage, and takes 
interest from the poem. Such enchanted weapons may 
be regarded as symbolic of the higher nature of tlie cause 
in which they are employed, of its inward power, and 
possibly of the true powers of the heroes, their spiritual 
force, and it may be that this emphasis on the spirituality 
of their force is the true reason for the introduction of 
the symbol; for these are not only Knights human, but 
Knights Christian and clothed with a might which is not 
of this world. Such an explanation, though plausible, 
seems mechanical; the truth which it contains is that the 
enchanted arms do not denote a higher degree of physi- 
cal strength, as if the Knights had rifles instead of 
spears, but a difference of spiritual power. It is, how- 
ever, much more clear that by the realm of enchantment 
in the poem is figured the interest which the supernatural 
world takes in man's conflict — the medieval idea that 
God and his angels are on one side and the devil and 



SPENSER 93 

his angels are on the other; and the presence of en- 
chantment in the poem is a means of expressing this 
belief. The reality of divine aid against devilish mach- 
ination is thus symbolized; but in one particular this 
aid is so important a matter that Spenser introduces it 
in a more essential and, in fact, in a human way. To 
Spenser's mind, no man could save himself, or perfect 
himself in virtue even, without Divine Grace; this was 
the doctrine he held, and, therefore, he made Arthur the 
special representative and instrument of Grace, and at 
each point of the story where the Knight cannot retrieve 
himself from the danger into which he had fallen, Arthur 
appears with his glorious arms for the rescue. The pres- 
ence of mystery in life, too, is not only thus felt in the 
atmosphere of enchantment and in the signal acts of res- 
cue by Arthur, but it also envelops the cardinal ab- 
stract ideas of the poem — such ideas, I mean, as wis- 
dom in Una, and as chastity in Britomart, to whose 
beauty (which is, of course, the imaging forth of the 
special virtue of each) is ascribed a miraculous power of 
mastery, as in Una's case over the Lion and the foresters, 
and in Britomart's case over Artegal. 

"And he himselfe long gazing there upon. 
At last fell humbly downe upon his knee, 
And of his wonder made religion, 
Weening some heavenly goddesse he did see." 

This is that radiance which Plato first saw in the counte- 
nance of Truth, such that, he said, were Truth to come 
among men unveiled in her own form, all men would 
worship her. So Spenser, learning from Plato, presents 
the essential loveliness of all virtue as having inherent 
power to overcome — precisely, you will remember, as 



94 THE TORCH 

Keats describes the principle of beauty in ^'H3^erion" 
as inherently victorious. 

The idea of life as a quest, with an atmosphere of 
danger and mystery, and presided over by great princi- 
ples such as wisdom, grace, chastity, so clad in loveliness 
to the moral sense that they seem like secondary forms 
of Divine being — these are fundamental conceptions 
in the poem, its roots, so to speak, and they belong in 
the ethical sphere. But Spenser was the most poetically 
minded of all English poets; he not only knew that 
however true and exalted his ideas of life might be, they 
must come forth from his mind as images, but he also by 
nature loved truth in the image more than in the ab- 
stract; and he therefore approached truth through the 
imagination rather than through the intellect. That is to 
say, he was a poet, first and foremost; and wove his 
poem of sensuous effects. Sensibility to all things of 
sense was his primary endowment; he was a lover of 
beauty, of joy, and his joy in beauty reached such a pitch 
that he excels all English poets in a certain artistic 
voluptuousness of nature, which was less rich in Milton 
and less pure in Keats, who alone are to be compared 
with him, as poets of sensuous endowment. It is seldom 
that the artistic nature appears in the English race; it 
belongs rather to the southern peoples, and especially to 
Italy; but when it does arise in the English genius, and 
blends happily there with the high moral spirit which 
is a more constant English trait — especially when it 
blends with the Puritan strain, it seems as if the young 
Plato had been born again. Both Milton and Spenser 
were Puritans who were lovers of beauty; and Spenser 
showed Milton that way of grace. No language can 
exaggerate the extent to which Spenser was permeated 



SPENSER 95 

with this sensuousness of temperament, and he created 
the body of his poem out of it — the color, the picture, 
the incident, figures and places, the atmosphere, the ca- 
dence and the melody of it. You feel this bodily delight 
in the very fall of the lines, interlacing and sinuous, with 
Italian softness, smoothness, and slide. You feel it in 
his love of gardens and streams; in his love of pictured 
walls, and all the characteristic adornments of Renais- 
sance art; in his grouping of human figures in the various 
forms of the masque; in his descriptions of wealth and 
luxury, of the bower of bliss, of the scenes of mythology; 
in every part of the poem the flowing of this fount of 
beauty is the one unfailing thing. It came to him from 
the Italian Renaissance, of course. It is the Renaissance 
element in the poem; and with it all the other elements 
are suffused. 

The worship of beauty, as it was known in all objects 
of art, and in all poetry which had formed itself, in de- 
scription and motive, on objects of art, was perhaps its 
center; but, in Spenser, it exceeded such bounds, and, 
though taken from the Renaissance, it was given a new 
career in Puritanism. For the singular thing about this 
sensuous sensibility in Spenser, this artistic voluptuous- 
ness in the sight and presence of beauty, is that it re- 
mained pure in spirit. In Renaissance poetry, using the 
same chivalric tradition as Spenser, this spirit has ended 
in Ariosto's "Orlando" — a poem of cynicism, as it seems 
to me. It is to the honor of the moral genius of the 
English that the Renaissance spirit in poetry, in their 
tongue, issued in so nobly different a poem as "The Faerie 
Queene." This was because, as I say, the Renaissance 
worship of beauty was given a new career by Spenser 
in Puritanism. Perhaps I can best illustrate the matter 



96 THE TORCH 

by bringing forward what was one of Spenser's noblest 
points. He raised this worship of beauty to the highest 
point of ideality by having recourse to the tradition of 
chivalry in its worship of woman, and blended the two 
in a new worship of womanhood. I think it will be 
agreed that, although Spenser's romance is primarily 
one of the adventures of men, it is his female characters 
that live most vividly in the memory of the reader. 
These characters are, indeed, very simple and elementary 
ones; they are not elaborated on the scale to which the 
novel has accustomed our minds; but they are of the 
same kind, it seems to me, as Shakespeare's equally 
simple types of womanhood — such as Cordelia, Imogen, 
Miranda — of which they were prophetic. What I de- 
sire to bring out, however, is not their simplicity, but 
the fact that they enter the poem to ennoble it, to 
raise it in spiritual power, and to strengthen the heroes 
in their struggles. In this respect, as I think, Spenser 
did a new thing. In the epic, generally, woman comes 
on the scene only to impair the moral quality and the 
manly actions of the hero: such was Dido, you remem- 
ber, in the "^Eneid," and Eve in "Paradise Lost/' and the 
same story, with slight qualifications holds of other epic 
poems. It is a high distinction that in Spenser woman- 
hood is presented, not as the source of evil, its presence 
and its temptation, but as the inspiration of life for such 
Knights as Artegal, the Red-Cross Knight, and others; 
and, furthermore, the worship of beauty, which they 
found in the worship of womanhood, is in Spenser hardly 
to be distinguished from the worship of those principles, 
which I have described as secondary forms of Divine 
being — the principles of wisdom, chastity and the like. 
I find in these idealities of womanhood the highest reach 



SPENSER 97 

of the poem, and in them blend harmoniously the chival- 
ric, artistic and moral elements of Spenser's mind. And 
as we feel in Spenser's men the near presence of such 
friends as Lord Grey, Raleigh and Sidney, it is not 
fanciful to feel here the neighborhood of EUzabethan 
women — such as she of whom Jonson wrote the great 
epitaph: 

"Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse; 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learned and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee." 

With this supreme presence of womanhood in "The 
Faerie Queene" goes the fact that warfare as such is a 
disappearing element; it is less prominent, and it inter- 
ests less, than might be expected. This is because, just 
as beauty in all its forms is spiritualized in the poem, so 
is war; the war here described is the inner warfare of the 
soul with itself; it is all a symbol of spiritual struggle, 
and necessarily it seems less real as a thing of outward 
event. The poem is one of thought, essentially; its ac- 
tion has to be interpreted in terms of thought before it is 
understood; it is, in truth, a contemplative poem, and 
its mood is as often the artistic contemplation of beauty, 
as the ethical contemplation of action. These are the 
two poles on which the poem moves. Yet they are 
opposed only in the analysis, and to our eyes; in Spenser's 
poem, and in his heart they were closely united, for 
virtue was to him the utmost of beauty, and its attain- 
ment was by the worship of beauty; so near, by certain 
aptitudes of emotion towards the supreme good, did he 



98 THE TORCH 

come to Plato, his teacher, and is therefore to be fitly 
described, in this regard, as the disciple of Plato. 

I wonder whether, as I have been speaking, the poem 
and its author grow more or less remote to you. Spenser 

— this philosophical Platonist, this Renaissance artist, 
this Puritan moralist — does he seem more or less cred- 
ible? Was it not a strange thing that he should think 
that the abstract development of a Christian soul, how- 
ever picturesquely presented, was an important theme of 
poetry? Yet it is true, that the most purely poetical of 
English poets, and one of the most cultivated minds of 
Europe in his time, had this idea; and in Elizabeth ^s 
reign — that is, in a period of worldly and masculine ac- 
tivity, of immense vigor, in the very dawn and sun- 
burst of an England to which our American imperial 
dream is but a toy of fancy — in that Elizabethan, that 
Shakespearian age, Spenser chose as the theme of highest 
moment the formation of a Christian character. I have 
spoken of the artistic remoteness of his poem, and of the 
remoteness of his literary tradition, its classical, me- 
dieval and Renaissance matter and method; but there is 
a third remoteness by which it seems yet more distant — 
the remoteness of its spirituality. In the days about and 
before Spenser there was great interest in the question 
of character in the upper classes; what were the quali- 
ties of a courtier was debated over and over in every 
civilized country, and the books written about it are still 
famous books and worth reading. Spenser took this 
Renaissance idea — what is the pattern of manhood? 

— and — just as in the case of the worship of beauty — 
gave it a career in Puritanism. The question became — 
what is a Christian soul, perfected in human experience? 
What are its aims, its means, its natural history? What 



SPENSER 99 

is its ideal life in this world of beauty, honor, service? 
And this question he debated in the six books of his 
half-completed poem, which has made him known ever 
since as the poet's poet. The Knight of the "Faerie 
Queene" is the Renaissance courtier Christianized — that 
is all. Here is the final spiritualization of the long result 
of chivalry as an ideal of manly life. That is the curious 
thing — that the result is, not merely moral, but spiritual. 
The spiritual life, in this sense, is far removed from 
our literature; it is so, because it is far removed from the 
general thought of men. The struggle men now think of 
as universal and typical of life, is not the clashing of 
spear and shield on any field of tourney, nor the fencing 
of the soul with any supernatural foe, seeking its dam- 
nation: it is the mere struggle for existence, with the 
survival of the fittest as the result, a scientific idea, and 
one that centers attention on the things of this world. 
This increases the sense in mankind of the materialism 
of human life and the importance of its mortal interests. 
Commerce seconds science in defining this struggle as a 
competition of trade, a conflict, on the larger scale, of 
tariff wars, a race for special privilege and open oppor- 
tunity in new countries. Science and trade are almost 
as large a part of life now as righteousness was in Mat- 
thew Arnold's day: he reckoned it, I believe, at three- 
quarters. The result is that mankind is surrounded with 
a different scheme of thought, meditation and effort from 
that of Spenser's age. He was near the ages that we 
call the ages of faith : he was not far from the old Catho- 
lic idea of discipline; he was not enfranchised from su- 
pernaturalism in Reformation dogmas; he lived when 
men still died for their religion ; — all of which is to say 
that the idea of the spiritual in man's life and its im- 



100 THE TORCH 

portance, was nigh and close to him. In our literature 
there is much presentation of moral character, in the 
sense of the side that a man turns toward his fellow 
beings in society: in Scott, Thackeray and in Dickens, 
George Eliot — to name the greatest, this is found ; but 
such spiritual character as Spenser made the subject 
of his meditation and picturing is not found. In the his- 
tory of literature, the hero of action has always ended by 
developing into the saintly ideal: so it was in Paganism 
from Achilles to ^Eneas; so it was in medievalism from 
Roland and Lancelot to Arthur, Galahad and Parsifal; 
and in this chivalric tradition Spenser is the last term. 
Will our moral ideal, as it is now flourishing, show a 
similar course — has our literature of the democratic 
movement, now in its early stages, the making of such a 
saint in it — that is, of the man to whom God only is 
real — as Paganism and medievalism in their day 
evolved? 

Spenser, then, being so remote from us, in all ways — 
the question is natural, why read his poem at all? Be- 
cause it is the flower of long ages : because you command 
in it as in a panorama the poetical tradition of all the 
great imaginative literature in previous centuries, classi- 
cal, medieval and Renaissance; because you see how 
Spenser, by his appropriation of these elements became 
himself the Platonist, the artist, the moralist, and fused 
all in the passion for beauty on earth and in the heavens 
above, and so centered his whole nature toward God; 
and what took place in him may take place, according 
to its measure, in us. For, though the thoughts of men 
change from century to century, and one guiding prin- 
ciple yields to another, and the ideal life is built up in 
new ways in successive generations, yet the soul's life 



SPENSER loi 

remains, however cast in new forms of the old passion 
for beauty and virtue. If Spenser be a poet's poet, as 
they say, let him appeal to the poet in you — for in 
every man there is a poet; let him appeal in his own way, 
as a teacher of the spiritual life; and, if my wish might 
prevail, let him come most home to you and receive inti- 
mate welcome as the Puritan lover of beauty. 



I 



VI 

MILTON 

Milton is a great figure in our minds. He is a very- 
lonely figure. For one thing, he has no companions of 
genius round him; there is no group about him, in his 
age. Again, he was a blind old man, and there is some- 
thing in blindness that, more than anything else, isolates 
a man ; and in his case, by strange but powerful contrast, 
his blindness is enlarged and glorified by the fact that 
he saw all the glory of the angels and the Godhead as no 
other mortal eye ever beheld them, and the fact that he 
was blind makes the vision itself more credible. And 
thirdly he has impressed himself on men's memories as 
unique in character; and, in his age defeated and given 
o'er, among his enemies exposed and left, with the Puri- 
tan cause lost, he is the very type and pattern of a great 
spirit in defeat — imprisoned in his blindness, poor, neg- 
lected, yet still faithful and the master of his own integ- 
rity; for us, almost as much as a poet, he remains the 
intellectual champion of human liberty. So through cen- 
turies there has slowly formed itself this lonely figure in 
our minds as our thought of Milton, and as Caesar is a 
universal name of imperial power, the name of Milton 
has become a synonym of moral majesty. But it was not 
thus that he was thought of in his own times. There is no 
evidence that Cromwell or the other important men of 
the state knew that Milton was greater than they, or that 

103 



104 THE TORCH 

he was truly great at all; to them he was pre-eminently 
a secretary in the state department. The next generation 
of poets — Dryden — called him ^'the old schoolmas- 
ter," you remember. In his earlier years he appealed to 
the taste of a few cultivated and traveled gentlemen, 
like Sir Henry Wotton, as a graceful and noble-lan- 
guaged poet; but it was a full generation after his death 
that he was accepted into the roll of the great, by Addi- 
son in the "Spectator,'^ and the next century was well on 
its way before he was imitated by new men as the Eng- 
lish model of blank verse. In the literary tradition of 
England, however, he is now established, and for all of 
us he stands apart, a majestic memory, as I have said, 
touched with the sublimity of his subject and with the 
sublimity of his own character. There is, too, in our 
thoughts of him, something grim, something of the 
sterner aspect of historical Puritanism; the softness of 
Spenser, the softness of his youth, had gone out of him, 
and he had all the hardness of man in him — he was 
trained down to the last ounce — he was austere. Yet I 
love to recall his youth — you remember the fair boy- 
face of the first portrait — a face of singular beauty; and 
you know his pink and white complexion was such at 
the University that he was called "the Lady of Christ's"; 
and, in those first years of his poetizing, he was deep in 
the loveliest verse of Greece and Italy, in Pindar and 
Euripides, in Petrarch and Tasso, as well as in Shake- 
speare and Spenser who were his English masters. He was 
a young humanist — filled to overflowing with the new 
learning and its artistic products, a lover of them and of 
music, and of everything beautiful in nature — he was 
especially a landscape-lover. Even then the clear spirit 
— the white soul — somewhat too unspotted for human 



MILTON 105 

affections to cling about, it may be — was there; you 
hear it singing in the high and piercing melody of the 
"Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which 
happily is usually a child's first knowledge of him; a cer- 
tain aloofness of nature he has, and nowhere do you find 
in his English verse — nor do I find it in his Latin verse 
where it is sometimes thought to be — nowhere do you 
find the note of friendship, of that companionableness 
which is often so charming a trait in the young lives of 
the poets. But within his own reserves — and perhaps 
the more precious and refined for that very reason — 
there was the same sensuous delight in the artistic things 
of sense, in natural beauty, in romantic charm, in the 
lines of the old poets, that there was in Spenser; and in 
this he was, as we mark literary descent, the child of 
Spenser, though of course his culture was fed from other 
sources and in larger measure, too. For he was a better 
scholar than Spenser — his times allowed him to be — 
and he had a far more powerful intellect. But, in these 
years of his milder and happier youth, when he was liv- 
ing in the country in his long studies — he was a student 
at ease till thirty — and when he was traveling in Italy, 
he was in the true path of Spenser and the Renaissance, 
the path of beauty, with faith in its divine leading. How 
permanent the doctrine of the divine leading of beauty 
was in Milton's mind will appear later; but here its 
early presence is to be observed, because it gives to 
Milton the true quality and atmosphere of his lost youth, 
and also marks the great difference in tone and temper 
between the earlier poems — so golden phrased, so mellif- 
luous, so happy — and the poems of his age, the "Para- 
dise Lost" and "Regained" and the "Samson." In 
"Comus," more particularly in "L'AUegro" and "II 



io6 THE TORCH 

Penseroso," is the young Milton — he that the fair- 
haired boy grew into, the humanist student, the writer 
of Italian sonnets, the ^'landscape-lover, lord of lan- 
guage" — before Cromwell's age laid its heavy and man- 
hood-enforcing hand on the poet who chose first to serve 
his country. 

But it is the poet of whom I am to speak; and, perhaps, 
before entering on the subject of his verse, it may be well 
first to endeavor to mark his place more precisely in 
English poetry and to account, partially at least, for its 
historical distinction. A poet, so great as Milton, you 
may be sure, occupies some point of vantage in history; 
he embodies some climax in the intellectual or artistic 
affairs of the world; and in Milton's case there are, 
I think, two historical considerations not commonly 
brought forward. I have had a good deal to say about 
allegory. It was the characteristic literary form of the 
Middle Ages; and the substitution of the direct story of 
human life in its place is one of the traits of modern 
times. You remember that the English drama, begin- 
ning from miracle plays and moralities and passing 
through the stage of historical plays, came finally in 
Shakespeare to a representation of human life as it is in 
the most direct manner. Those of you who have seen 
the play of "Everyman" have a very vivid idea of 
what allegory is in a drama, and how such a drama differs 
from ''Romeo and Juliet." In "Everyman" abstract 
principles are personified, and their play in life illus- 
trated; in "Romeo and Juliet," the passions and virtues 
are in the form of character, are humanized as we say, 
are there not as abstract principles but as human forces. 
The development of English drama from an allegorical 
mode of presenting life and character to a human realiza- 



MILTON 107 

tion of them in men and women culminated in Shake- 
speare, who thus stood at a historic moment of climax in 
the evolution of his art. Now, you easily recognize the 
likeness of such an allegorical play as "Everyman" to 
Spenser^s "Faerie Queene,'' in its method of personifying 
the virtues and the temptations. Religious narrative 
poetry remained allegorical, and medieval in artistic 
method, not only in Spenser, but in his successors, such 
as the Fletchers. Milton was the first English poet to 
humanize completely the characters and events of reli- 
gious story, to put the religious scheme and view of the 
world into the form of human things, and to expel from 
the work the abstract allegorical element wholly. Thus 
he is related to previous narrative religious poetry in 
England precisely as Shakespeare is to the moralities of 
early drama. He stands at this point of climax in the 
evolution of his particular branch of poetic art. Reli- 
gious poetry was sixty years later than dramatic poetry in 
reaching this perfect humanization of its material; and 
thus it happens that Milton, though so much younger 
than the Elizabethans, is commonly thought of as belong- 
ing to their company and in fact the last late product of 
the age of their genius. 

Secondly, we are accustomed to think of the Renais- 
sance as on the whole an affair of the southern nations, 
and especially of Italy; but it was a European move- 
ment, a wave of thought and peculiar passion that slowly 
crept up the North, and it reached its furthest point in 
England, and there, as I think, it reached its highest lit- 
erary development. Shakespeare was the climax of the 
Renaissance; its passion for individuality, for a free 
career for the human soul, and its instinct of the dignity 
of personal life, were the very forces to unlock most 



io8 THE yORCH 

potently dramatic power; and in Shakespeare this was 
accomplished, and you know how besides he used its 
material and lived in its atmosphere. Spenser, also, as 
I said in the last lecture, took the worship of beauty and 
the idea of the courtier from the Renaissance, spiritual- 
ized the one and Christianized the other, and gave them a 
new career in English Puritanism. Milton is to be asso- 
ciated with Shakespeare and Spenser, as a third and the 
last great representative of the Renaissance in England, 
and as there carrying its epic power to a degree of per- 
fection far beyond what it had reached in Italy, exceeding 
both Ariosto and Tasso; in him were the learning 
and taste of the Renaissance, its cultivation of individ- 
uaUty and respect for it — in both matter and spirit 
he belonged fundamentally to that movement, and was 
its latest climax. I therefore define his historical posi- 
tion as being the point at which religious poetry was com- 
pletely humanized in England, and at which the Renais- 
sance spirit generally as a European movement culmi- 
nated in epic poetry. 

^'Paradise Lost" is the poem by which Milton lives. 
Fond as we may be of his younger verse, and apprecia- 
tive of the eloquence of 'Taradise Regained" and of the 
tragic simplicity of "Samson Agonistes," yet popular 
judgment is to be followed in finding in "Paradise Lost" 
the true center of Milton's genius. Every poet who 
achieves a single great poem puts his whole mind into it, 
empties his mind and tells all he knows; his felicity is to 
find a subject which permits him to do this; such was the 
course of Homer and Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Goethe, to 
name a few, and Milton was no exception to the rule. 
He included in his poem the entire history of the universe 
from the heaven which was before creation to the millen- 



MILTON 109 

nium which shall be the consummation of all things; 
and, in this great sphere of action he chose as the objec- 
tive point the moral relation of mankind to God, cer- 
tainly the highest subject in importance; and in elabor- 
ating his work he used all the wealth of his literary 
knowledge and culture, the entire literary tradition of 
the race, just as Spenser did — only more broadly; what- 
ever, either in matter or method, there was serviceable 
in past literature — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and 
English — all this Milton used. He grasped and con- 
structed the subject with great mental power and artistic 
skill; although, in minor parts, his conventional machin- 
ery and devices have been attacked, the leading lines of 
his construction stand clear of criticism. He really took 
three great themes, any one of which would have fur- 
nished forth a poem, and blended them together with 
such dexterity that they are seldom separated even in 
analysis — so perfect is the unity of the resulting whole. 
In the first place, you recognize at once in "Paradise 
Lost" a Christian adaptation of the Titan Myth. The 
rebellion of the angels is conceived as a war of the Titans 
against the gods ; and is treated in accordance with Greek 
imagination as a conflict in which the mountains were 
used as weapons: — 

"From their foundations, loosening to and fro, 
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load, 
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops 
Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze, 
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host 
When coming towards them so dread they saw 
The bottom of the mountains upward turned . . . 
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads 
Main promontories flung, which in the air 
Came shadowing . . . 



no THE TORCH 

So hills amid the air encountered hills, 
. . . horrid confusion heaped 
Upon confusion rose." 

Satan on the flood of hell is conceived as of Titanic 
form: 

"With head uplift above the wave, and eyes 
That sparkling blazed ; his other parts besides 
Prone on the flood, extended long and large, 
Lay floating many a road, in bulk as huge 
As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 
Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, 
Briareos or Typhon" — 

and you recall how he reared himself from off the fiery 
lake, and took his station on the shore, with the ponder- 
ous shield whose ^ 'broad circumference hung on his 
shoulders like the moon," and stayed his steps with his 
tall spear — 

"To equal which the tallest pine 
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand;" 

and there summoning his squadrons loomed over them 
like the sun "in dim eclipse, disastrous twilight shed- 
ding on half the nations." Such is Satan^s figure at the 
first, and it is by such images of Titanic darkened gran- 
deur that his form is most vividly remembered. I have 
spoken of the difficulty the poets have had in defining 
the forms of the Titans to the eye. Milton solves the 
problem by ascribing to the devil and his angels no deter- 
minate form; they are, so to speak, collapsible and ex- 
tensible at will; and they take the appropriate scales of 
proportion in whatever scene they are placed. 

It is common to think of Satan as the true hero of the 



MILTON III 

poem, and as an imaginative figure he certainly occupies 
the foreground; yet to Milton he was a hateful being, and 
I am convinced that familiarity with the poem takes 
from him that admiration which properly should belong 
to the hero, and at the end he is clearly felt as the object 
of repulsive evil, whom Milton meant him to be. Mil- 
ton's method, after presenting Satan in somber but ma- 
jestic form, is gradually to debase him to the eye as well 
as to the mind. Here the treatment sets him apart from 
any conception of the Titan Prometheus in bonds; for 
Prometheus is never felt to be debased even physically 
by the punishment of Zeus. The first revolt of the 
reader's mind from its initial admiration for Satan takes 
place, I think, acutely in the scene at the gate of hell 
when he meets Sin and Death. The association of Satan 
with such horrible beings as they are represented to be, 
and the knowledge that his intimacy with them is that of 
fatherhood, shocks the mind with ugliness — ugliness that 
is almost bestial in its effect. When he reaches the new 
earth, after his address to the Sun, he is seen trans- 
formed in countenance — 

^Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face 
Thrice changed with pale — ire, envy and despair. 
Which marred his borrowed visage — " 

and soon he is "squat like a toad" at the ear of Eve; 
whence touched by the young angel's spear, he rises 
"the grisly King," so changed from his heavenly self 
that he is unrecognized. Then, after one more grand Ti- 
tanic figuring of his might — the most impressive of all 
— as he opposes Gabriel : — 

"On the other side, Satan, alarmed, 
Collecting all his might, dilated stood, 



112 THE TORCH 

Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved: 

His stature reached the sky, and on his crest 

Sat Horror plumed; — " 

after this unforgetable and heroic figure, Milton dis- 
misses him from the poem in the scene in hell, where, re- 
turning after his triumph to take the applause of his host, 
he is, in the moment of his highest boasting, transformed 
into the serpent with all his followers in like forms — a 
scene so repellent that perhaps none has been more ad- 
versely commented on. This gradual degradation of Sa- 
tan, in his form, is, it seems to me, a cardinal point in the 
poem. It is to be associated with Milton's idea of beauty 
— that Platonic idea which I mentioned. The first ob- 
servation of Satan in hell is the lost brightness of Beelze- 
bub whom he addresses: 

"If thou beest he — but oh, how fallen ! how changed 
From him, who, in the happy realms of light 
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine 
Myriads, though bright! — " 

When he comes to the new creation, the radiance of the 
sun reminds him of the same change in himself, and 
when the young angel surprises him in Eden, it is his 
lost beauty that he mourns. 

"So spake the cherub: and his grave rebuke, 
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace 
Invincible. Abashed the Devil stood 
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw 
Virtue in her shape how lovely — saw, and pined 
His loss; but chiefly to find here observed 
His luster visibly impaired." 

The power of beauty over him is the last vestige of his 
lost nobility. Thus in Eden gazing on Adam and Eve, 
he says, — 



MILTON 113 

"Whom my thoughts pursue 
With wonder, and could love: so lively shines 
In them divine resemblance;" 

and just before the temptation, in the presence of Eve, 
he felt her beauty to be such that — 

"That space the evil One abstracted stood 
From his own evil, and for the time remained 
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, 
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge." 

It is only by a recovery of his evil nature that he gains 
power to go on with his deceit. Such relics of faded glory 
as his brow wore, such relics of the sense of beauty also 
remained in his spirit. The debasement of his form, cul- 
minating in the scorpion scene in hell, is — for Milton 
— one and the same thing with the corruption of his 
moral nature, and is in fact a principal means of charac- 
terization; for in each new act Satan takes a new form. 
There is nothing elsewhere in literature quite like this. 
It is, however, the peculiar meanness of his revenge 
which most degrades Satan^s character; in his rebellion 
against God, in his unavailing courage, when powers felt 
and depicted as great are matched against omnipo- 
tence, in the mere ruin of such tremendous power, there 
are sublime elements; but in his triumph over mankind 
there is no true joining of forces for equal encounter — 
in fact Satan is never brought in contact with Adam di- 
rectly — and though Paradise is surrounded with guards 
and watched over by Uriel in the sun, these are no real 
defences; mankind is felt to be unsheltered, the power 
of Adam and Eve to remain obedient is not so presented 
as to seem a match for the power of the devil, and Satan 
consequently appears to triumph over a weak and inno- 



114 THE TORCH 

cent foe, harmless to him, whom he sacrifices in a malig- 
nant spirit of revenge by ignoble and secret ways. In 
his own character, and apart from man, Satan embodies 
the Renaissance ideal of the freedom of the individual, 
of the affirmation of one's own life, of development of 
one's powers and qualities and opportunities — he is like 
a brilliant, unscrupulous, rebellious Italian prince having 
his own way with the world he is born into; to conceive 
of him as resembling an English rebel against the Crown, 
or at all indebted to that character, except perhaps in the 
point of resolute defiance, is, I think, to misconceive him 
altogether, although it is a common view. He was, on 
the contrary, the Renaissance prince seeking his free 
career, valuing individual talent and force above every- 
thing, the concentration of personal faculty, pride, ambi- 
tion — and conscienceless in his determination to live all 
his life out. In his struggle with omnipotence, he secures 
respect for certain qualities of strength which in alliance 
with virtue are great qualities, and even in wickedness 
do not lose their impressiveness ; but in his easy triumph 
over Eve in the Garden, and in its consequence to man- 
kind, he becomes contemptible in his aim, his method, and 
his being. 

Certain important differences in the Titan Myth as 
treated by Milton should be noticed. You observe that 
the Greek situation is reversed: the angels are the 
younger race of beings, and according to Greek ideas 
should have succeeded and thereby have asserted the 
principle of progress. The angels, however, were de- 
feated. Of course, there is no room in the scheme of the 
universe, as Milton conceived it, for any progress — the 
being and the reign of God are already perfect, and 
progress is only the salvation of man, that is, a restora- 



MILTON 115 

tion of things. Restoration, not Revolution, is Milton's 
cardinal idea. It follows from this that hell is necessarily 
the end of the angels; it is a cul-de-sac, a blind alley. — it 
leads nowhere — it has no future; the poem stops in that 
direction as if it had run against a wall. The denial of 
progress has brought everything to a standstill, with eter- 
nal damnation for the angels and ultimate restoration 
for mankind. It is here, I think, that modern sympathy 
parts company with this portion of the poem — that is, 
with the conception of hell in it. Our thoughts are so 
pledged to the idea of progress, to the thought of evolu- 
tion as the law of all created beings, that the notion of 
hell as a kind of sink and prison of the universe finds no 
place for itself in our minds. The only thing in civiliza- 
tion that resembles hell is the modern jail, and that we 
desire most potently to eliminate, in the sense that it shall 
not be a place that leads nowhere, even for the most hard- 
ened. I desire, however, only to set sharply over against 
each other in your minds the Hebrew fixity of Milton's 
thought and the Greek idea of progress, as they are 
brought out by the mythic wars of heaven in each case; 
and to suggest that the failure of the poem to interest the 
modern mind in hell, except as a spectacle, is connected 
with the fundamental denial of progress in it, and its 
departure from the thought of development. 

The second great theme which Milton incorporated 
into his poem is the Bower of Bliss. This is the theme by 
means of which love, which next to war is the great sub- 
ject of poetry, enters into the epic; the hero is with- 
drawn from battle, and tempted to forget his career in 
the world, by love for a woman. The importance of the 
theme, and its relative proportion of interest in the epic 
as a whole, steadily increased — it was a convenient way 



ii6 THE TORCH 

of withdrawing the leading character and giving the other 
heroes an opportunity for display free from his rivalry, 
it was interesting in itself as opening up the whole field 
of the romance and tragedy of love, and it was the best 
kind of an episode to vary the story. Thus the loves of 
iEneas for Dido, in the "^neid," and of Armida for Ri- 
naldo in 'Tasso,'' were represented. For Milton Eden is 
a Bower of Bliss, in this sense. It freed his hand for de- 
scription of nature in her softest scenes and in the at- 
mosphere of love. You may recall Tennyson's summary 
of it, in his lines on Milton — 

"Me rather all that bowery loneliness, 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring. 
And bloom profuse, and cedar arches 
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean 
Where some refulgent sunset of India, 
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean-isle. 
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 
Whisper in odorous heights of even." 

Here Milton had the characteristic scenery of the Bower 
of Bliss, and he elaborated it with Renaissance richness 
of luxurious natural detail. The situation was also char- 
acteristic, and the power of woman to weaken the moral 
force of the hero through love was illustrated: the issue 
only was different, for whereas in the normal epic the 
hero breaks his bonds and goes back to his career — 
to the founding of Rome or the capture of Jerusalem — 
Adam was made the tragic victim of his fall, and with 
him all mankind. Adam, from every point of view, holds 
an unenviable position, for a hero: he never, as I have 
said, is brought to a direct encounter with Satan, his 
great enemy, and in this round-about conflict in which 
he falls through the temptation of Eve his defeat is irrep- 



MILTON 117 

arable. It is singular to observe that in the only other 
English poem of epical action — in Tennyson's ''Idylls 
of the King," Arthur is similarly a hero of defeat; the 
breaking of the Round Table is the catastrophe, brought 
about by the sin of Guinevere in the orthodox conven- 
tional way, and Arthur, when he sails away "to heal him 
of his grievous wound" leaves a lost cause behind him in 
the world. It would be a curious enquiry — could one 
answer it — why the two great epic poems of the English 
represent the cause of the higher life as suffering a tem- 
porary overthrow in this world. Not to enter upon that, 
however, I have only time to point out that, as it seems 
to me, modern sympathy also parts company with Mil- 
ton in this portion of the poem, inasmuch as it has 
grown unnatural for us to regard womanhood as the pe- 
culiar means by which moral character is impaired, and 
the world lost; rather we go with Spenser in his convic- 
tion that womanhood is the inspiration of noble life. The 
character of Eve as Milton drew it is from a very an- 
cient world of myth and race- thought: the influence of 
chivalry on the worldly side, and on the spiritual side 
the influence of the beatification of motherhood in the 
Virgin Mary, have profoundly affected and changed the 
ancient thought, and though not unfelt in Milton they 
have not sufficient power in him to modify essentially 
the primitive conception of Eve. It is the more unfortu- 
nate that Milton's own temper, as a husband, was such 
that he has vigorously emphasized in his poem the infe- 
riority of woman to man, her natural subjection to him, 
and in general has left to her only that loveliness and 
charm which most appealed to him as a poet. 

The third great theme of Milton is a cosmogony — 
that is, a story of creation: it is told by Raphael to Adam, 



ii8 THE TORCH 

and it is supplemented by the history of mankind which 
is shown to Adam prophetically by Michael. It has been 
the fashion of science to ridicule, as Huxley did, Mil- 
ton's description of the origin of living creatures; but as 
a tale of creation, his story is quite the most consistent 
and nobly imaginative of any that poets have told, and 
his panorama of history is effectively unrolled, with 
comprehensiveness, vigor of thought and vividness of 
scene. In two respects, nevertheless, modern sympathy 
parts company with Milton here, too. He adopted as his 
scheme of the universe of space, you remember, the 
older or Ptolemaic idea, that the earth is the center, and 
is surrounded by the spheres, one inside another, till you 
reach the outermost or primum mobile. He knew, of 
course, the Copernican scheme, which we now all hold, 
when we think of the relation of the earth to the sun and 
stars. It was, I think, the classical prepossession of his 
mind — his desire for a world limited, closed and clear, 
like a Greek temple — which led him to adopt this older 
scheme of the universe. But the result is that the rest of 
the poem is apt to seem as antiquated as its celestial 
geography. Again, in his view of history, he necessarily 
made human history unroll as a consequence of the fall 
of Adam, and gave an importance to its Biblical events, 
which they can only retain in a limited way. The center 
and movement of history are now so differently con- 
ceived by the general modern mind that Milton's ac- 
count of history has little essential interest to the reader. 
Such, as it lies in my mind, is the composition of the 
^'Paradise Lost" — a Titan Myth, a Bower of Bliss, 
and a Cosmogony or story of creation and history, 
blended into one unified poem in which the central 
event is the fall of Adam. It is a poem of the Renais- 



MILTON 119 

sance, the last great product of that movement flowering 
in the far and Puritan North; it is enriched with all the 
treasures of the New Learning, softened with all the 
imaginative graces of humanism; and in the great charac- 
ter of Satan, it presents, on his noble side, the most mag- 
nificent embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of free and 
imperious individuality, and on his ignoble side it reflects 
some of the fairest gleams of Platonic philosophy. I 
have indicated in what important ways it seems dis- 
connected with the modern mind, in its scientific and his- 
toric scheii'ies, in its primitive view of the evil of woman- 
hood, and in its opposition to the idea of progress. I 
should perhaps sum this last idea to a point, and say that 
in the poem the charter of free-will which the Creator 
gives to the angels and to Adam operates as a limitation 
on omnipotence; it is impossible for the modern mind to 
look on the Creator except as the giver of good; and yet 
his gift in this poem so operates as to make his omnipo- 
tence continually manifest in the act of damnation; it 
operates to damn the angels through their revolt, to 
damn Adam through his fall, and to damn mankind 
through Adam. Within the limits of the action described, 
the poem is thus from the first line to the last a poem of 
the damnation of things, in which the fact of final partial 
restoration is present as an intention and promise only. 
This is what makes it a poem of past time, and removes 
it far from the modern mind. For the democratic idea 
— which is the modern mind — is a power to save : it will 
have no prisons of vengeance, no servile nor outcast 
races, no closed gates of hopeless being. "Paradise 
Lost" is thus set behind us, as an embodiment of a his- 
torical phase of the Christian idea — like Dante. 
I am aware that the verdict seems adverse to Milton; 



120 THE TORCH 

but it is not so in reality, though I desire to make plain 
the fact that "Paradise Lost" is now a historical poem, 
a past event in the imaginative life of the race. But no 
words I can use would sufficiently express the admira- 
tion which this poem excites in me — not merely for its 
unrivalled music, nor for its style which Matthew Ar- 
nold thought keeps it alive, but for its construction as an 
act of intellect, for its sublime imagination in dealing 
with infinite space, infinite time, and eternity and the 
beings of eternity; for its beautiful surface in the scenes 
in Paradise, its idyllic sweetness and charm, the habitual 
eloquence and noble demeanor in the characters; nor 
do I find its later books less excellent, in which austere 
thought and nakedness of idea more appear — the char- 
acteristics of the poet coming into his own, and content 
with truth unadorned, simple and plain — the sign and 
proof, of which "Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
Agonistes" are greater examples, that as a poet he was 
perfected. Small in amount, indeed, is the verse that I 
have read more often; such strength, such exquisiteness, 
such elevation, he has no rival in, for power and grace, 
for refinement; his voice is master of his theme; and he is 
seated in the heavens of poetry where Shelley saw him — 

"The third among the sons of light." 



vn 

WORDSWORTH 

We approach our own times; and if, hitherto, litera- 
ture has seemed to us a somewhat far-off thing, a thing 
of the Greek Myth, of chivalric allegory, of the Renais- 
sance hero, it should now grow near and fast to us as our 
chief present aid in leading that large race-life of the 
mind whose end, as I have said, is to free the individual 
soul. The notion that poetry is a thing remote from life 
is a singular delusion; it is more truly to be described 
as the highway of our days, though we tread it, as chil- 
dren tread the path of innocence, without knowing it. 
Nothing is more constant in the life of boy or man than 
the outgoing of his soul into the world about him, and 
this outgoing, however it be achieved, is the act of poetry. 
It is in the realm of nature that these journeys first take 
place; nature is a medium by which the soul passes out 
into a larger existence; and as nature is very close to all 
men, perhaps our experience with her offers the most 
universal, certainly it offers the most elementary, illus- 
tration of the poetical life which all men in some meas- 
ure lead. Wordsworth is, pre-eminently, a guide in this 
region; and, as he was less indebted than poets usually 
are to the great tradition of literature in past ages, 
poetry in him seems more exclusively a thing of the pres- 
ent life, contemporary and altogether our own. Such a 
poet, endeavoring by a conscious reform to renew poetry 

121 



122 THE TORCH 

in his age and bring it home to man's bosom, eliminating 
the conventional ways, images, and language even of 
the poetic past, is necessarily thrown back on nature, 
in the external world, and on character, in the internal 
world, for his subject-matter; history, except in con- 
temporary forms, will be far from him, and of myth and 
chivalry, of Plato and the Italians, though he will have 
his share, he wdll have the least possible. This may 
leave his verse bare and monotonous in quality, but what 
substance it does contain will have great vitality, for 
it comes directly from the man. You will observe, how- 
ever, that his narrower scope of learning, treatment, and 
theme makes no difference in the essential point of 
interest. His longest and most deliberate poem — that 
one into which he tried to empty his entire mind, as I 
said is a great poet's way — ''The Prelude," is the his- 
tory of the formation of his mind; that is, plainly, his 
subject is the same as Spenser's — how in our days is a 
human soul brought to its fullness of power and grace? 
The manner, the story, the accessories, the entire color 
and atmosphere, are changed from what they were in 
the Elizabethan times, but the question abides. Spenser 
is hardly aware that nature has anything to do with 
forming the soul; to Wordsworth, nature seems its chief 
nourishment and fosterer, almost its creator. I desire to 
illustrate how Wordsworth represented the outgoing of 
the soul in nature, as a part of its discipline, its educa- 
tion in life, like the quest of the Knights in Spenser. 

When you go out to walk alone in a scene of natural 
beauty, your senses are first excited and interested; but 
often there arise in consequence feelings and ideas har- 
monious with the scene, and emotionally touched with 
it, which gradually absorb your consciousness; and at 



WORDSWORTH 123 

last you find yourself engaged in a mood — perhaps of 
memory — from which the external scene has entirely 
dropped away or round which it is felt only as a nimbus 
or halo of beauty, or mystery or calm. This happens con- 
stantly and normally to all of us, and it is an act of 
poetry; for it is the very method and secret of the lyric. 
The poet receiving some impulse through his senses 
delights in it, and rises by natural harmony to feelings 
and ideas that belong with such joy, and ends in the 
higher pleasure to which his senses have served him as 
the stairway of divine surprise. Such a poem is Burns's 
"Highland Mary"; he begins with the outer scene, 
woods and the summer, and you will notice how at the 
end all has dropped away except the love in his heart: 

"Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery, 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never drumlie! 
There simmer first unfauld her robes, 

And there the langest tarry; 
For there I took my last fareweel 

O' my sweet Highland Mary. 

How sweetly bloom'd the gay green birk, 

How rich the hawthorn's blossom. 
As underneath their fragrant shade, 

I clasp'd her to my bosom! 
The golden hours, on angel wings. 

Flew o'er me and my dearie; 
For dear to me, as light and life, 

Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

Wi^ mony a vow, and lock'd embrace, 

Our parting was fu' tender; 
And, pledging aft to meet again. 

We tore oursels asunder; 



124 THE TORCH 

But oh! fell Death's untimely frost, 

That nipt my flower sae early! 
Now green 's the sod, and cauld 's the clay, 

That wraps my Highland Mary. 

Oh, pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 

I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly; 
And closed for aye the sparkling glance, 

That dwelt on me sae kindly! 
And mouldering now in silent dust, 

That heart that lo'ed me dearly! 
But still within my bosom's core 

Shall live my Highland Mary." 

His heart has taken the place of all the world as 
Mary's dwelling. 

This experience, this course of emotional thought, is 
the habit of the human heart; it is repeated countless 
times in any man's life. In each case the poem depends 
only on where we stop our minds. We may stop in the 
outer scene, and have only beautiful description: we may 
go on into the mood of imagination or memory, and end 
there; we may go further, and reach some contact with 
divine things, with God in nature. It is easy to illustrate 
the matter from Wordsworth, for he has himself defined 
these stages. You remember his account of his boyish 
skating on the ice: 

" — All shod with steel 
We hissed along the polished ice, in games 
Confederate, imitative of the chase 
And woodland pleasures, — the resounding horn. 
The pack loud-bellowing, and the hunted hare. 
So through the darkness and the cold we flew. 
And not a voice was idle: with the din 
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; 
The leafless trees and every icy crag 



WORDSWORTH 125 

Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills 
Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars. 
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
The orange sky of evening died away. 

Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
Into a silent bay, — or sportively 
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, 
To cut across the reflex of a star; 
Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed 
Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes. 
When we had given our bodies to the wind. 
And all the shadowy banks on either side 
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 
The rapid line of motion, then at once 
Have I, reclining back upon my heels. 
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs 
Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled 
With visible motion her diurnal round ! 
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, 
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched 
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea." 

Any boy, who has skated on the river, has lived that 
poem: has had the physical sense of the scene, which 
arouses in him a certain reverberation of feeling. The 
second stage — that of youth — is as usual, though in 
Wordsworth it was uncommonly prolonged and intense: 

"Though changed, no doubt from what I was when first 
I came among these hills; when like a roe 
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams. 
Wherever nature led: more like a man 
Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then 
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days. 
And their glad animal movements all gone by) 



126 THE TORCH 

To me was all in all. — I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite: a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past, 
And all its aching joys are now no more, 
And all its dizzy raptures." 

Here the physical scene is less felt — the excitement, the 
reverberation, is greater. There is the third stage, to 
which in this poem he immediately passed on: 

"For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity. 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused. 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air. 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts. 
And rolls through all things." 

Here the physical scene has become abstract and ele- 
mental — diaphanous beauty — and he is in the pres- 
ence of the divine power shining through its veils. Na- 
ture, beginning with the awe of boyhood, ripening into 
the passion and high delight of youth, matures in man- 
hood in the spiritual insight which makes the daily 



WORDSWORTH 127 

process of life in merely living under the sky and in sight 
of earthly beauty an act of worship. It is plain, as I said, 
that the degree to which any man may live Wordsworth's 
poem depends only on where his mind stops in its ordi- 
nary human process, whether with the boy on the ice, the 
youth on the mountains or the man with "the light of 
setting suns." In all these cases, you will notice, Words- 
worth represents the soul as going out from him into 
the large material sphere. 

Wordsworth, however, was acutely conscious of the 
reaction of nature on mankind, of its formative power 
over men and their lives. The idea is most familiar to us 
as the influence of the environment; and we think of a 
sea-coast people, like the Greeks, as differing from a 
mountaineer people, like the Swiss, because of their 
natural surroundings. The idea, however, is more pre- 
cise than that. The field which the farmer tills slowly 
bends his form to itself. You remember Millet's famous 
painting "The Angelus." The peasant who is its center 
has been physically formed by toiling in the fields where 
he stands; you feel as you look, that the landscape itself 
is summed up, and almost embodied in him, its crea- 
ture, and the picture is spiritualized, and made a type of 
our common humanity, by the sound of the Angelus 
reflected in his prayerful attitude. That is the way that 
Wordsworth conceived of nature as forming his dales- 
men and shepherds. There is this landscape quality in 
all his memorable characters ; you think of them, you see 
them, in connection with the soil. Thus you recall the 
figure of the Reaper; you see her at her task in the field, 
and the song she sings: 

"The music in my heart I bore 
Long after it was heard no more'* — 



128 THE TORCH 

that song unifies the poem and spiritualizes it, precisely 
as the prayer does in "The Angelus." So you see 
"The Leech-Gatherers": 

"In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace 
About the weary moors continually 
Wandering about alone and silently;" — 

So, too, Simon Lee, the old huntsman, and Matthew 
at his daughter's grave, and Michael, the builder of the 
sheep-fold, and Ruth, and good Lord Clifford, are 
landscape figures. 

Wordsworth carried his thought of the formative 
power of nature beyond this point, and to take at once 
the characteristic poem, he saw nature forming the soul 
of a woman: 

"Three years she grew in sun and shower. 
Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower 
On earth was never sown; 
This child I to myself will take; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 
A Lady of my own. 

'Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse: and with me 

The Girl, in rock and plain, 

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 

Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle or restrain. 

'She shall be sportive as the Fawn 
That wild with glee across the lawn 
Or up the mountain springs; 
And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
And hers the silence and the calm 
Of mute insensate things 



WORDSWORTH 129 

The floating Clouds their state shall lend 

To her; for her the willow bend; 

Nor shall she fail to see 

Even in the motions of the Storm 

Grace that should mold the Maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

The Stars of midnight shall be dear 

To her; and she shall lean her ear 

In every secret place 

Where Rivulets dance their wayward round, 

And beauty born of murmuring sound 

Shall pass into her face. 

'And vital feelings of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height, 

Her virgin bosom swell ; 

Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 

While she and I together live 

Here in this happy Dell.' " 

The poem comes to its climax in the thought that 
' 'beauty born of murmuring sound, shall pass into her 
face.'^ There is nothing extravagant in the idea. You 
have all seen a face transfigured while listening to mu- 
sic, or to the sea; and the thought is that such listening 
being habitual, the expression becomes habitual, and 
not only that but the peace and joy and inner harmony, 
which the expression denotes, have become habitual, 
that is, parts of character. Wordsworth displays his 
thought more at length in the ^'Tintern Abbey" lines, in 
his counsel to his sister and his confessions of his own 
life with nature. In consequence of this general attitude 
of mind toward the educating power of nature, Words- 
worth held his maxim, that we "can feed this mind of 
ours with wise passiveness." 



130 THE TORCH 

He had a faith as perfect as that of the Concord phil- 
osophers in the alms of the idle hour. And he did not 
mean merely that thoughts and impressions stream in on 
one, who expands his petals to the flying pollen of 
heaven, or that moral instances like the lesson of the 
Celandine will store his collector's box, but that inti- 
macy — habitual intimacy with the highest truths of 
the soul — is reached in this way. He had the impres- 
sion that childhood was especially susceptible to these 
influences and revelations; and the glorification of 
childhood which is a marked trait of his most deeply- 
felt verse, lies in this neighborhood of its being to nature 
and nature's revelations. In his ode on the ^^Intimations 
of Immortality" in childhood he pours forth, in the 
most passionate and eloquent phrase, his clearest, 
most vivid and most penetrating intuitions of the 
power of nature in these ways, on the boy and the 
man. 

Such are some of the moods in which Wordsworth 
conceived the operation of nature on man as molding 
both general and individual life, the thoughts and emo- 
tions of men and women, and the soul of childhood, as if 
nature were the delegated hand of God to shape our 
lives, and carried with its touch some power to impart 
heavenly wisdom. Wordsworth, you observe, had a very 
primitive mind ; in that act of gazing on setting suns he is 
not far from being a sun-worshipper: he still can believe 
that "every flower enjoys the air it breathes." He 
conceives of nature, as an element, in grand lines; and 
he thinks of the phases of human life even — of its great 
occupations, its affections and sorrows, almost as if they 
were parts of nature — even more closely united to it 
and with greater kindliness than Virgil represented 



WORDSWORTH 131 

them in the Georgics. This simple, primitive, elemen- 
tary mind underlies his thought of childhood, too, and 
it appears, perhaps, most significantly in the fact that 
when through nature he touches on the boundaries of 
divine being, he achieves no more than a sense of the 
presence of God in nature — it is only a silent presence 
— he does not find, so far as I can see, at any time 
the voice of God there. This is the primitive mood of 
savage and pagan man. 

Perhaps it may be well to consider for a moment the 
place of nature in modern life, apart from Wordsworth. 
Lucretius, who first took a scientific view of the world, 
as a poet, found in nature the inveterate hard foe of 
mankind: he it was who first saw the careless gods look 
down upon 

"An ill-used race of men that cleave the soil. 
Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil. 
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil, 
Till they perish." 

Virgil, as I have said, felt rather the kindly cooperation 
of nature with man in producing the fruits of the field, 
and the flocks and herds of the hills, to feed and clothe 
us. Our view is not so much that of Lucretius, of the 
opposition, but rather of the indifference of nature. She 
knows not mercy, nor justice, nor chastity, nor any 
human virtue; and man in emerging from her world lives 
in a sphere of thought, conduct, and aspiration to which 
she is a stranger. Yet, that kindly cooperation that Virgil 
saw, still continues on the lower levels of life, and the 
great change is that, whereas of old and in his day the 
sense of dependence on nature, that is to say on the gods, 
was habitual and daily, now through the growth of the 



132 THE TORCH 

world, that dependence is no longer felt as at all super- 
natural; the harvest ripens or fails, but we have little 
thought of the gods therewith; and, in fact, the habitual 
sense of the dependence of our own bodies on the favor 
of heaven is a vanishing quality. It is a consequence of 
this that our life necessarily grows more purely spiritual, 
and such dependence on the divine as is recognized is a 
dependence of the soul itself, felt in the contemplative 
mind and much more in the life of the affections. Na- 
ture as an intermediary between God and man has lost 
in importance, through the growth and spread of the 
idea of the order obtaining in nature as against the idea 
of nature as a series of special providences in relation to 
our daily lives. I count this loss as a gain, inasmuch as it 
throws the soul back on its own higher nature and essen- 
tial life. But there is another change. Of old the thought 
was of the earth and toil upon it; that was nature; now 
our thought of nature is of a force, which we subdue. It 
has come about through the extraordinary development 
of mechanical skill. Of old we taught the winds to waft 
our ships, and the waters to drive our mills ; but now — 
to take the significant example — we have enslaved the 
lightning. Nature has become in our thoughts a Cali- 
ban reduced to civility by being put in bonds. I have 
much S3mipathy with theoretic science; with the mind's 
view of the world — and I recognize its noble results, 
not only in philosophic thought, but in much impres- 
sionistic art. But I have all of a poet's impatience of ap- 
plied science. I remember hearing a story years ago of a 
snail who got mounted on a tortoise: *'My!'' he said, 
"how the grass whistles by!" And when I hear people 
in trolley-cars talk of riding on the wings of the lightning 
I think of the snail. What is the speed of the lightning to 



WORDSWORTH 133 

the swiftness of the "wings of meditation and the 
thoughts of love" that the soul of Hamlet knew? Is Ni- 
agara essentially an electric-lighting plant? I have 
heard men of science — the same men who told me that 
Homer never did anything of half the importance of a 
theorem in mechanics — I have heard them sneer at the 
old Greek idea that man was the center of the universe 
— the Christian idea that Milton had — the idea of 
George Herbert: 

"Man is one world, 
And hath another to attend him: — " 

this idea was man's foolish egoism. But is it a larger 
idea to think of nature as man's Jack-of -all-trades? 
For me, I must say, science — applied science — de- 
grades the conception of nature in narrowing it to the 
grooves of material use. Yet this is, in general, our mod- 
ern idea — the prevailing idea — of nature. What poem 
of recent years has been more acclaimed than that in 
which a Scotch Presbyterian engineer found in his en- 
gine the idea of God? It is well that he should find the 
idea there, as it was well in the eighteenth century that 
the clock-maker should find his idea of God as a clock- 
maker, since that was the measure of his knowledge of 
God; but, for all that, the narrowing influence of these 
scientific conceptions is no less. Hence it is that we fall 
into the commonest error of men — the error of per- 
spective, a wrong sense of the proportion of things. Our 
eyes are fixed on the material uses of nature, and he is 
great among us who sets her to some new task in cheap- 
ening steel or facilitating transportation. Now in Words- 
worth there is nothing of this; he hardly notices, indeed, 
what to Virgil was so important, her cooperation in 



134 THE TORCH 

agriculture and the life of the farm. Wordsworth restores 
to us the spiritual use of nature; and the spiritual use 
that man makes of the world is the really important 
thing. With that primitive mind of his, he realizes at 
once the closeness with which we are cradled in nature, 
the universality of her life round about us: 

"He laid us as we lay at birth 
On the cool flowery lap of earth; 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease. 
The hills were round about us, and the breeze 
Went o'er the sunlit fields again: 
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain." 

For the least conscious, for the semi-vital among men, 
nature is the blanket of God round about them; for the 
most spiritually-minded, nature is the ante-room to His 
presence, and our way to a higher life. In poem after 
poem Wordsworth illustrates all modes of approach by 
which on the threshold of nature the soul grows con- 
scious of itself; especially he shows how nature feeds the 
mind with beauty through the senses : 

"Sensations sweet 
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart 
And passing even into my purer mind;" 

and thus is a chief minister to us in that building of our 
own world — physical, emotional, moral — each one of 
us for himself, which is the necessary task of all. It is not 
a machine that we have to make, to hew v/ood and draw 
water for us, and carry us from place to place at elec- 
trical speed; it is a world that we have to build for our 
souls to live in and grow through, a world of happy 
memory, of pure hope, of daily beauty, the world of our 
habitual selves, and Wordsworth shows what elements 



WORDSWORTH 135 

for such a world of the soul — for such a daily self — 
nature provides and what is the art of its construction. 
To Wordsworth, however, no more than to other poets 
was nature the whole of life: and even to him, if you stop 
to think about it, nature has no life of her own, but is 
only one mode of the soul's existence and self-con- 
sciousness. He came back at last, as all do, to man as 
the only subject that finally interests men. I said that in 
nature he found only the presence, but not the voice, of 
God. The voice of God he found in his own bosom, in 
conscience, in duty, as you remember in his ''Ode to 
Duty" he begins: 

"Stern daughter of the voice of God, 
O Duty — if that name thou love — " 

The second great root of his poetry is character — 
moral character, and in defining and enforcing its ideals 
none of our poets is more truly English, more truly of 
the race to which character is always an engrossing and 
primary interest. In the poem, called "The Happy 
Warrior" he delineated both the public and private as- 
pects of character, as conceived by the English, with a 
felicity of phrase and solidity of thought, and also with 
eloquent distinction, such as to place the poem apart by 
itself as unique in our literature. The better example, 
however, for my purposes, is the portrait of a woman — 
"She was a phantom of delight," — the companion-piece 
to that I have already read — in which he begins from 
the things of sense, and goes on, in the way I have de- 
scribed, to the moral, and finally to the spiritual sphere. 
Here the lyric method of poetry is again illustrated — 
how, starting from the external world it becomes at last 
purely internal — which is the method, as you recognize, 



136 THE TORCH 

of all poetical life in essence. Apart from abstract char- 
acter, the sphere of human life which Wordsworth most 
attended to was of course that humble life of the poor 
in which he was most interested because they were near 
to the soil, and, as he thought, nearer on that account to 
nature's hand. It is, however, a transparent error to 
think of dalesmen and shepherds as nearer to nature in 
this sense; it is one of the fallacies of civilized life; for 
Wordsworth himself is the shining example how much 
more, in both intimacy and fullness, was his life with 
nature than that of any other in his generation. Nature 
is not to be thought of as a kind of agricultural-school 
education, a thing for children and dalesmen; but the 
same rule that holds of all the gift of life holds here, that 
the beneficence, the splendor and mystery of the gift, in- 
creases with the power of him who receives it. Words- 
worth was the true and faithful poet of lowly lives, and 
as such he is endeared to humanity; he was the second 
great democratic poet, succeeding Burns, from whom he 
learned to be such, as he says; but he comes more di- 
rectly and intimately into our own lives through his per- 
sonal force — through his own experience of what nature 
meant to him. 

In what sense, then, is Wordsworth a race-exponent? 
Principally and distinctively in the fact that he sums up, 
illustrates, and amplifies the experience of the race in its 
direct relation to nature. With that primitive mind on 
which I have dwelt, he spanned the difference between 
the earliest and the latest thought of the race ; to him, in 
certain moods, nature was animated with a life like our 
own, he believed it enjoyed its life as we do, and this is 
primeval belief; at the other end of progress he was as 
pantheistic as he was animistic here, and saw nature 



WORDSWORTH 137 

only as another form of divine being. Thus he contem- 
plated nature almost as the savage and almost as the 
philosopher, and commanded the whole scope of hu- 
man thought with relation thereto. He presented nature 
through this wide range as a discipline of the soul in its 
development; it is, first, a discipline in beauty, in the 
power to see and appreciate loveliness, and he especially 
values this as a means of building up a beautiful mem- 
ory—perhaps the chief consolation of advancing life. 
So, in the lines to the ''Highland Girl," he writes: 

"In spots like these it is we prize 
Our Memory; feel that she hath eyes:" 

So he wrote again of that inward eye 

"Which is the bliss of solitude" — 

and illustrates it by the vision of the daffodils; and in the 
same spirit counsels his sister: 

"Thy mind 
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
Thy memory be as a dwelling place 
For all sweet sounds and harmonies." 

Secondly, it is a discipline of the emotions, which nature 
evokes and exercises. The emotion is represented, nearly 
always I think, as that reverberation of feeling which I 
spoke of. Perhaps its most spiritualized example is in 
Tennyson : 

"Tears, idle tears: I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair, 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes 
In looking on the happy autumn fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more." 



138 THE TORCH 

The reverberation of emotion, here, is the poem. It is 
this reverberation, truly speaking, which Wordsworth 
interprets as the sense of the divine presence in nature: 

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts" — 

Thiraly, it is a discipline of the moral sense. Hei e, per- 
haps, we have most difficulty in going along with Words- 
worth. When he says : 

*'One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good 
Than all the sages can:" 

when he writes of himself as 

"Well pleased to recognize 
In nature, and the language of the sense. 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being" — 

we do not readily understand his meaning. Yet if you rec- 
ollect his life, as his poems disclose it like a series of an- 
ecdotes of what happened to him, you see not only how 
often he returned from his rambles in the hills with a 
strengthened moral mind in consequence of some lesson 
he may have derived from some flower or cloud, which 
spelled out for him in an image of beauty his secret 
thought, or set up by an initial impulse that train of feel- 
ing which resulted in meditative moral thought, but how 
much more often he returned so strengthened by the 
sight of some human incident, history or character which 
to him wore the aspect of a fact of nature; for he did not 
discriminate between nature and its operation in the 



WORDSWORTH 139 

lives of common folk; all life is necessarily moral, and 
nature by passing influentially into the lives of his dales- 
men and shepherds became thereby moral in essence; 
nature exceeded its bounds here, in the moral sphere, 
just as in becoming divine it exceeded its bounds in the 
spiritual sphere. Wordsworth was no pantheist; he had 
the dews of baptism upon him and remained in the pews 
of the establishment all his life; but, both in his panthe- 
istic verse, and in his verse ascribing moral wisdom to 
nature, he sincerely described certain experiences of his 
own in which he derived religious emotion and moral 
strengthening and enlightenment through his contact 
with nature and the natural lives of his neighbors on the 
moors and hills. Emotion was always mainly fed in 
him, imaginatively, from the forms of nature; and the 
strengthening of emotion, and the habit of it, necessa- 
rily builds up the moral nature of man — it is the mode 
of its nurture. I am accustomed to say that Keats is a 
poet to be young with, and that Wordsworth is a poet to 
grow old with. The element of habit counts for much in 
such communion with nature as Wordsworth illustrates; 
for it is not any flash of thought he brings, any revela- 
tion of emotional power as a sudden discovery of the 
soul; the power of nature has begun to steal upon the 
boy, in his skating or his nutting, or his whistling to the 
owls, and thereafter it only grows. Meditation, too, is a 
large element in the habit Wordsworth establishes to- 
ward nature, and memory, as we have seen, bears a part 
in it. It follows that, not only is his power over his read- 
ers cumulative with years, but his attitude toward na- 
ture must have the force of habit with us before it can 
render to us what it rendered to him. With the formation 
of this habit comes that consoling power which lovers 



140 THE TORCH 

of Wordsworth find in his verse, what Arnold called the 
healing power of nature. I do not myself see any healing 
power of nature in such instances as Michael, or Ruth, 
or the affliction of Margaret; there are wounds which na- 
ture cannot heal, and Wordsworth was sensible of this: 
he did not, as Arnold says he did, look on "the cloud of 
mortal destiny" and put it by; no English poet can. But 
it is true that in the life-long appeal that Wordsworth's 
verse makes especially to the sober and aging mind by 
virtue of its equable temper, its moral strength, its 
simple human breadth of sympathy, as well as by its su- 
preme rendering of the spiritual uses of nature in our 
daily lives, its tranquillizing power is also a main source 
of its hold on the general heart. 

Such, in its phases, is the discipline of nature for the 
soul as Wordsworth presents it. The poetic act, as I have 
said, is the going out of the soul. If we do not fare forth 
on any quest of the old knightly days, yet all life consists 
in such a faring forth, in going out of ourselves into 
some larger world, practically into a club or a church or 
a college or a political party or a nation — in litera- 
ture it consists in going out into the race-mind, in any 
or all its forms, into the life of the race as an idealized 
past, or as a part of present nature or present humanity. 
I have illustrated, hitherto, the imaginative or spiritual 
forms of history, and to-night the imaginative or spiritual 
forms of nature, in either of which the soul may take its 
course in the larger life, and going out of itself find the 
freedom of the universe its own — in beauty, reason, 
liberty, righteousness, love — the ideal elements to 
which all paths, whether of history or nature, lead, when 
imagination is the guide. It remains only to illustrate the 



WORDSWORTH 141 

same general theory by the example of the poet who 
dealt most powerfully with human life as a thing of the 
present as Wordsworth dealt most powerfully with 
nature in the same way. That is the next, and final 
lecture. ' 



VIII 

SHELLEY 

In lecturing on Wordsworth I did not refer to his best- 
known verses, the half-dozen lines which have more lu- 
mmousness of language, I think, than any other English 
words: ° 

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
•Hath had elsewhere its setting 
And Cometh from afar; 
Not in entire forgetfulness. 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of gloiy do we come 
From God, who is our home." 

"Magnificent poetry," said John Stuart Mill "but 
very bad philosophy." However that may be, the lines 
express the idea, natural to all of us, that we are in some 
sense heirs of past glory. We are accustomed to think of 
heredity, as something founded as it were in past time 
under the operation of the laws of natural selection and 
stored m us physically; and embryologists say that the 
long series of physical changes, in consequence of which 
man finally became in his body the lord of living crea- 
tures, IS reflected with great rapidity in the human em- 
bryo, so that when the body is born it has in fact passed 
through the entire race-history in a physical sense. We 
are no sooner born, however, than we enter at once on a 
new period of heredity, and acquire also with great ra- 

J43 



144 THE TORCH 

pidity the mental and moral powers which originally 
arose slowly in the race through long ages of growth, 
and we become civilized men by thus appropriating 
swiftly funds of knowledge and habits of thinking, feel- 
ing and acting; this is the education which makes a man 
contemporary with his time, and perhaps it normally 
ends in the fact, for most men, that he does what is 
expected of him, and also feels and thinks what is ex- 
pected of him. That is the conventional, well brought 
up, civilized man. 

There is a third sphere of heredity, with which these 
lectures have been concerned, in which it is more a mat- 
ter of choice, of temperament and vitality, whether a 
man will avail himself of it, and appreciate it. Men, 
generally speaking, are but dimly aware of their powers 
and capacities outside of the practical sphere; in our 
growing years we require aid in discovering these ca- 
pacities and exercising these powers; we require, as it 
were, some introduction to ourselves, some encourage- 
ment to believe we really are the power of man that we 
are, and some training in finding out vitally what that 
power of man in us is. This is our use — the earliest — 
of literature; it interprets us to ourselves. It does this by 
fixing our attention on some things that we might not 
have noticed — on natural things of beauty, and by pro- 
viding appropriate thoughts and stimulating delightful 
emotion in respect to these things; or it helps us by 
arousing feeling for the first time, perhaps, with regard 
to some part of life, and by giving noble expression to 
such new feeling or to some emotion hitherto vague and 
indeterminate in our bosom; and it especially aids us by 
giving play to our forces in an imaginary world, where 
both thought and feeling may have a career which 



SHELLEY 145 

would be impossible to us in our narrow world of fact. 
The poverty of not only the young, but of most men, in 
spiritual experience, is probably far greater than men 
of maturity and culture readily conceive; it is possible 
that the forms of the church even far exceed the capacity 
of the people to interpret them, just as Dante, or any 
high work of imagination would. The poets interpret 
what is forming in us, and offer new objects of contem- 
plation and emotion in the imaginary world; they go but 
a little way before us, for they can be read and under- 
stood only by the light of our own experience; but 
hand by hand, one leads us to another till we are in the 
presence of the greatest. I do not know whether Shake- 
speare unlocked his heart, as Wordsworth said, with the 
key of the sonnet; but I know literature is the key which 
unlocks our own bosoms to ourselves; though, in con- 
sequence of that respect for the individual life of the 
soul, which is one of the mysterious marks of man's 
nature, no hand but our own can turn the lock in its 
wards. What I described the other night as the poetic 
act — the going forth of the soul — must be the act of 
the man himself; but it is through literature that the 
paths make out — the highways trodden by many feet. 
As you go out on these great highways of the soul, 
in Dante, in Shakespeare, in Goethe, a strange thing will 
happen to you: it will seem, in the variety of new ideas, 
in the flood of a new feeling arising in you, that you are 
changed within, that you have found almost a new self. 
I remember once when I was studying the now lost art 
of wood-engraving, looking as I was at hundreds of 
woodcuts constantly, it happened that when I went out 
to walk, I saw woodcuts in the landscape; my eye hav- 
ing grown accustomed to certain line and form-arrange- 



146 THE TORCH 

ments of an artistic sort, naturally picked out of the gen- 
eral landscape such arrangements, as you make pic- 
tures in the fire; that is to say, my eye, dwelling on this 
feature and neglecting that, composed the landscape, 
made a picture of it. Now that is the constant act of life. 
The human soul finds the world a heterogeneous mass 
of impressions; and it attends to certain things, and 
neglects others, and composes its picture of life that 
way; prefers certain memories, certain desires, and so 
builds its own world, as I have constantly said. It 
applies this method of composition even to itself. You 
read Byron, and before you know it you see 
yourself in Byron's ways, you pick out and favor 
your Byronic traits, you find you are Byron in your 
self-portrait; or you read Thackeray and you find your- 
self in "Arthur Pendennis"; or, on the broader scale, you 
read Greek a good deal, Greek history and art as well 
as literature, and you find you see the world as a Greek 
world — or, again, as a French world, as the case 
may be. The change is a great one, amounting almost to 
the discovery of a new world and yourself a new self in it. 
So, in Goethe's life, the Italian journey and the study of 
the antique made a new and greater Goethe of him. So 
the mind of Milton, originally English, was Hebraized, 
Hellenized and Italianized. The discovery of the new 
self may often be repeated, and each new self enters into 
and blends with the old selves, and makes your personal- 
ity, or, at least, gives form to it. So the young Roman 
poet was Homer and Lucretius and the Alexandrians, 
and is Virgil; so the young Italian was Virgil, and is 
Dante; so the young Englishman was Theocritus, was 
Catullus, was Keats, and is Tennyson. What is involved, 
you see, is a kind of mental embryology; just as the phy- 



SHELLEY 147 

sical man sums up rapidly the age-long change from the 
lowest to the highest creature-life, just as the conven- 
tional man sums up in the same way the ages from bar- 
barism to civilization and spans them in his education, so 
here the soul in its highest life — that free soul that I 
have spoken of — sums up and spans the difference be- 
tween the ordinary man and the highest culture the race 
has ever known, and now holds in his own spirit that ac- 
cumulation, that power of man, which (by heredity en- 
tered into of his own choice) makes him an heir of past 
glory — for the splendor, the leading light, the birth- 
light of which Wordsworth's verse is none too extrava- 
gant an expression. 

Literature, then, is the key to your own hearts; and 
going out with the poets you slowly or swiftly evolve new 
life after new life, and enter partially or fully on that 
race-inheritance which is not the less real and sure be- 
cause you must reach out your hand and take it instead 
of having it stored in your nerves and senses at birth; 
predispositions to appropriate it are stored even there, 
but it is a thing of the spirit and must be gathered by the 
spirit itself. You will, perhaps, pardon one word of 
warning. This process that I have described is a vital 
process, a thing of life, and it must be real. There is al- 
ways at work that selective principle by virtue of which 
you compose life in the ways most natural to you. It 
may well happen that some great author does not appeal 
to you, and the reason is that you have not in yourself 
the experience to read him by; moreover, being a process 
of life, this process is one of joy, and if any author, no 
matter how great, does not give you pleasure, the process 
is not taking place. Therefore, do not read books that, 
after a fair trial, give no pleasure; do not read books 



148 THE TORCH 

that are too old, too far in advance of you. If they are 
really great, they will come in time; but if, for example, 
Dante's "Inferno" is a weary place to your feet and 
your soul feels its thousand contaminations, do not stay 
in such a place; and so of all other books with names 
of awe. Honesty is nowhere more essential than in 
literary study; hypocrisy, there, may have terrible penal- 
ties, not merely in foolishness, but in misfortune; and 
to lie to oneself about oneself is the most fatal lie. The 
stages of life must be taken in their order; but finally you 
will discover the blessed fact that the world of literature 
is one of diminishing books — since the greater are found 
to contain the less, for which reason time itself sifts the 
relics of the past and leaves at last only a Homer for 
centuries of early Greece, a Dante for his entire age, a 
Milton for a whole system of thought. To understand 
and appreciate such great writers is the goal; but the 
way is by making honest use of the authors that appeal 
to us in the most living ways. The process that I have 
described is the one by which all men advance and come 
into their own — men of genius no less than others : for I 
cannot too often repeat the fundamental truth that the 
nature and power of the soul, its habits, its laws and 
growth, are the same in all men; it sometimes happens 
that a man who goes through the process of this high 
spiritual life, becoming more and more deeply, vari- 
ously and potently human, developing this power of man 
in him, has also a passion for accomplishment — and 
that is one of the marks of a man of genius. Shelley 
was such a man; and I desire to present him, as a man 
with a passion for accomplishment, but also as an extraor- 
dinarily good illustration of the mode in which a man, 
through literature, evolves the highest self of which man- 



SHELLEY 149 

kind is capable, summing up in his own soul the final re- 
sults and forward hopes of the race. 

At the outset let me guard against a common mis- 
conception. Shelley is too often thought of as having 
something effeminate in his nature. This is due, in great 
part, to his portrait which with all its beauty, gives an 
impression of softness, dreaminess and languor; in it there 
is little characteristically masculine. It is also due, 
in some measure, to the preponderance of feeling over 
thought in his verse, of imagery over idea, and in general 
of atmosphere over form; his is what we may call a 
color-mind. The misconception of Shelley to which I 
refer is most boldly stated by Matthew Arnold, who 
called him an ^'ineffectual angel beating his beautiful 
wings in the void." Now nothing could be said of Shel- 
ley that is more wrong than that. Shelley was a high- 
spirited, imaginative child; he was a resolute Eton boy 
— who would not fag, you remember, and being always 
persistent in rebellion, carried his point; he rode, and 
shot the covers in his younger days, and was a good 
pistol-shot, all his life delighting in the practice. He was 
a very practical man, in business affairs, after he came of 
age and had learned something of human nature. He 
was the only man who could handle Byron with tact and 
reason. He made a very good will. In fact, his practi- 
cal instinct developed equally with his other qualities. 
Neither was he a moping poet. He had fits of high 
spirits — of gaiety; he used habitually to sing to him- 
self going about the house. As boy and man, both, he 
was typically English, aristocratically gentle in all his 
ways and behavior, only nervous, impulsive, strong, 
willful, quick to see, quick to respond — a very deter- 
mined and active person; and, in fact, manly to the full 



150 THE TORCH 

limit of English manhood. Perhaps there is always some- 
thing feminine in poetic beauty — the expression that 
we see typically in the pictures of St. John the Beloved; 
but, apart from that light on his face and that grace in 
all his ways, Shelley was as manly a man as they ever 
make in England. 

This being premised, then, one reason why Shelley is 
so good an illustration of the development of a modern 
soul is the fact that the record with respect to him is so 
complete. No human life, with the exception possibly of 
Lincoln's, has been so entirely exposed to our knowl- 
edge, from his earliest days: it seems as if nothing of 
him could ever die, no matter how slight, bo5dsh and 
trivial it might be. Thus it comes about that we see his 
forming mind in its first crudities. He was an eager boy, 
alive, awake, interested, voracious, pressing against the 
barrier of life for his career. He began with a taste for 
the most extravagant, melodramatic romance — what 
was then known as the German tale of wonder, in which 
the young Sir Walter Scott had also taken much in- 
terest; it was what we should describe as a dime-novel 
taste, except that its characters were monks and nuns 
and alchemists and wandering Jews; Shelley himself 
wrote two romances and many short poems and one long 
of this sort by the time he was sixteen years old, and 
published them moreover. He was always impatient, 
quick to act, to be doing something. His imagination 
was first fed by this sensationalism, and it was also scien- 
tifically excited by the spectacular side of chemical ex- 
periments ; and then he began to think — at first it was 
politics — such things as the freedom of the press, the 
rights of Catholics, reform; or it was morals — such 
things as property, marriage; or it was metaphysics — - 



SHELLEY 151 

such things as Lockers sensational philosophy, and the 
ideas of the age. Radical ideas in all their imperfection 
of newness filled his mind, reform took hold of him. He 
went to Ireland to make speeches, and made them, dis- 
tributed tracts, subscribed to funds, helped men who 
were prosecuted, especially editors, got himself put under 
observation as a dangerous character: and he was not yet 
twenty-one years old. 

There was then little sign of poetic genius in him; he 
had always written verses, of course, but there is no line 
of his early writing that indicates any talent even for 
good verse. But his mind had dipped in life, in thought, 
in action, and was impregnated with all kinds of power; 
especially his mind had dipped in ideas — the ideas of 
the perfectibility of mankind, of experimental method in 
science, of immediate social change in England in such 
fundamental things as wealth and marriage. He was 
always a person of convictions rather than opinions; he 
wanted to live his thoughts, and together with his great 
causes he carried about a full assortment of minor mat- 
ters, such as vegetarianism, for example. In a word, he 
began as a Reformer, and he was as complete an in- 
stance of the type as ever walked even the streets of 
Boston. But he found language more generally useful 
than action in standing forth for his ideas; and great 
command of language having already accrued to him 
through the incessant hammering of his brains on these 
ideas, making them malleable and portable and efficient 
for human use, there came to him also that intenser 
power of language, that passion of expression which finds 
its element in noble cadences and vital images of poetry 
as naturally as a bird flies in the air. Yet the passage 
from the power of prose to the power of poetry in 



152 THE TORCH 

Shelley is not a very marked advance. What he dis- 
covered, in writing ''Queen Mab," his first real poem, 
was the opportunity that poetry gives for unfolding a 
great deal of matter with logical clearness and eloquent 
effect, with immense concentration and intensity; what 
he discovered was the economy of poetry, the economy, 
that is, of art, as a mode of expression; and, in fact, when 
he had written ''Queen Mab'' he found — to use the 
words I have habitually employed — that in its few hun- 
dred lines he had emptied his mind; he had done what 
genius always does. The poem, however, was a Reform- 
er's poem; it contained a striking rendering of the image 
of the starry universe, an account of the history of man's 
progress, and some delicate poetical machinery in the 
mere setting of the piece. Its true subject was social 
reform. Five years later he emptied his mind a second 
time in the poem called "The Revolt of Islam"; in the 
interval he had withdrawn more from individual enter- 
prise and special causes in the contemporary world, and 
had come to realize the power of literature, as greater 
than any he could exercise otherwise, in the bringing of 
a better world on earth ; but he still held to political and 
social reform, and wrote, under the example and in the 
stanza of Spenser, this allegorical tale of the Revolution 
and the successful reaction against it then displayed in 
Europe; the poem remains an inferior poem, in conse- 
quence of its material and method; but it contained all 
that was in Shelley's mind at the time, and was written 
in the model and method of what was then to him the 
highest art. Five years again went by, and he again 
emptied his mind in the "Prometheus Unbound." 

In the interval great changes had taken place in him. 
He was still further removed from practical measures of 



SHELLEY 153 

reform — not that he ever lost interest in them — but 
practical reform requires a machinery that he could not 
provide; and he now more fully recognized the power of 
ideas, of eloquence to stir men's hearts, of poetry to em- 
body images of the ideal with mastering force; and es- 
pecially he recognized the fact that practical reform is a 
thing that from moment to moment results from ab- 
stract principles which have an eternal being. More- 
over, he had fallen in with Greek, in this interval, with 
Greek choral poetry on the one hand, and with Greek 
Platonic philosophy on the other. His mind was Hellen- 
ized; like a dark cloud, his soul approached the dark 
clouds of iEschylus and Plato; and the contact was an 
electrical discharge of power: the flash of that discharge 
was the ^Trometheus Unbound." Furthermore, Shelley's 
poetical faculty had developed marvelous brilliancy, sen- 
sitiveness, color, atmosphere, sublimity of form, suf- 
fusion of beauty, and, all this, with a lyrical volume, in- 
tensity and penetration of tone, which his earlier verse 
had not shown. He had become, under the play of life 
upon him, a poet, so throbbing with the high life of the 
soul that he seemed like an imprisoned spirit, with 
the voice of the spirit, calling to men like deep unto deep; 
and the world seemed to lie before him transfigured, 
wearing a garment of outward beauty like a new morn- 
ing, and, in the human breast clothed with freedom, 
nobility, hope, such as belongs to the forms of millennial 
days. Shelley had gathered into his heart the power of 
man that I have been speaking of, and stands forth as its 
transcendent example in his age. He had dropped from 
him, like hour-glass sand, the specific things of earlier 
days, things of the free press, of Catholic rights, of put- 
ting reform to the vote, of national association, of 



154 THE TORCH 

Welsh embankments — all things of detail; and also all 
lesser principles of property or marriage laws; he had 
reached the fountains of all these in the single prin- 
ciple of the love of man for man, which alone he was 
now interested to preach and spread. He had let go, 
too, of all revolutionary violence, as anything more than 
a secondary means of reform, and he clung to the prin- 
ciple of patience, of forgiveness, of non-resistance, as 
the appointed means of triumph, as I have already il- 
lustrated in treating of the ^'Prometheus." '^I have," 
he wrote, in his preface, '^a passion for reforming the 
world": it was his fundamental energy of life; but re- 
form for him was not now to be discriminated from the 
preaching of Christ's Gospel. The boy who had begun 
with a dime-novel taste had come into such etherealized 
powers of imagination that the poem of ^'Epipsychid- 
ion" is, perhaps, the extreme instance of ideal purity in 
English; the boy who had begun with Locke's sensa- 
tionalism had come to be the most Platonic man of his 
age in his spirituality: the boy who had begun with an 
indignant challenge to orthodoxy had come to be the 
voice of Christianity itself in its highest forms of moral 
command; the boy who began as the practical reformer 
had come to be the poet, smiting the source of all re- 
form in the spirit itself, and using all his powers of 
thought, imagination, learning, and all the means of art, 
to set forth the ideals of the spirit in their eternal forms. 
He had passed through politics, philosophy, religion — 
through English and French and Greek ideas — through 
Italian and Spanish imaginative art, and he now summed 
in himself that power of man which he had lived through 
in others — it had become his, it had become himself. 
In the whole course of this development no trait is more 



SHELLEY 155 

important to observe, than his marvelous intellectual 
honesty; he took only what at any moment was capable 
of living in him; he gave it free course in his life, outlived 
it, transmigrated fron; it, and came to the next stage of 
higher life, and so won on to the end. 

The development of Shelley was as rapid as it was 
complete; he was not yet thirty years old when he had 
become the center of human power that he was, a center 
so mighty that it would be two generations before its 
influence in the world, and its comparative brilliancy 
among English poets, could begin to be measured. His 
genius, we now see, was that of a double personality; he 
had, so to speak, two selves. First, and primary in him 
was his social self, his public self, that by which he was 
a part of mankind, was interested in man, felt for man, 
suffered in man's general wretchedness in Europe, brooded 
over his destiny, formulated principles for his regenera- 
tion, and lived in the hopes, the faith, the struggle of 
mankind. The greater works of his mind, which he 
elaborated with most conscious aim to serve the world, 
were the ones I have named, "Queen Mab," "The Re- 
volt of Islam" and "Prometheus Unbound," with the 
later, almost episodical choric drama, called "Hellas," 
whose subject was the Greek Revolution then going on: 
all these were the expression of his social self. In early 
life, so absorbed was he in politics, morals, and phil- 
osophy, that he hardly realized he had any life except in 
these; but, as years came on him with their load, he de- 
veloped a personal self, private and individual, the Shel- 
ley who was alone in the world, on whom fell the burden 
of discouragement, the penalty of error, the blows of 
fortune and circumstance, the wounds of the heart; and it 
was in this self that his poetic power was first put forth; 



156 THE TORCH 

his sensitiveness, his response to nature, his lyrical en- 
thusiasm, his aspiration, his melancholy; and he carried 
over these powers to the expression of his social self, as 
he carried over all his faculties and resources to that 
cause. But the home of his poetic genius was in his per- 
sonal life; and the poems by which he is known as an 
artist, as a mere human spirit without reference to any 
special application of its life-work, are those in which the 
personal self is directly and spontaneously expressed, the 
^'Alastor'^ being the first, and after it the "Adonais'' 
and the "Epipsychidion" ; and in addition to these longer 
pieces, the short lyrics, odes and stanzas, and the frag- 
ments, all of which are effusions, overflowings of his 
own heart. If the sense of his greatness is most sup- 
ported by the larger creative works of his imagination, he 
is most endeared to men by these little poems of love and 
sorrow, of affection, of joy in nature, and of human regret. 
The most poignant of them are those in which the aspi- 
ration is itself a lament — and in them is the intimacy of 
the poet's heart. It is impossible to close one's eyes to 
the fact that Shelley, wholly unappreciated as he was 
by the public, or in private for that matter, was deeply 
dejected in his last years; the personal, the artistic self, 
was always a relatively increasing part of his life, and he 
occasionally attempted great works, like the '^Cenci" or 
"Charles II," which had no social significance. Had he 
lived, it can hardly be doubted he would have become 
more purely an artist, a creative poet, conceiving the 
cause of mankind more and more largely as a spiritual 
rather than an institutional cause, a cause of the re- 
birth of the soul itself rather than of the re-birth of na- 
tions. In his personal self one principle reigned supreme 
— the idea of love; love guided all his actions, and was 



SHELLEY 157 

the impulse of his being — love in all its forms, personal, 
friendly, humane; by that selective principle that I spoke 
of he saw life as a form of love. It is here that the true 
contact occurs between his personal and his social self, 
for he made love — the love of man for man — the 
principle of society regenerated as he pictured it in the 
"Prometheus." And again, he made love, in the ''Ad- 
onais" the principle of Divine being — that Power, 

"Which wields the world with never- wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above." 

Wordsworth found the presence of God in 

"The light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air" — 

primarily as something external; Shelley found it pri- 
marily as something known most intimately and clearly 
in his own heart. 

A poet of really high rank is seldom a very simple 
being; he is made up of many elements, some one of 
which usually has the power of genius, and when that is 
at work in him, he is great. In Shelley there are at least 
three such elements; he w^as a poet of nature, and es- 
pecially he had the power to vivify nature almost as the 
Greeks did, to give it new mythological being, as in "The 
Cloud." He was also a poet of man — the thought of 
man was like a flame in his bosom. And he was a poet of 
his own heart, putting his own private life into song. A 
poet is greatest when he can bring all his powers to bear 
in one act — then he gives all of himself at once. Shel- 
ley most nearly did this, I think, in the "Ode to the West 
Wind." The poem arises out of nature, in the triple as- 
pect of earth, air and ocean, held in artistic unity by the 



158 THE TORCH 

West Wind blowing through them; and it becomes at its 
climax a poem of the hopes of mankind, and Shelley 
himself as the center of them, like a priest. So he 
invokes the West Wind to which by his act he has given 
an imaginative being as if it were the spirit of the whole 
visible world of air, earth and sea: 

"Be thou, spirit fierce, 
My spirit, — Be thou me, impetuous onel 
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse. 
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth, 
Ashes and sparks, — my words among mankind." 

^'My words among mankind.'' That is not the voice of 
an ineffectual angel. It is the rallying cry of a great and 
gallant soul on the field of our conflict. When you read 
the "Ode to the West Wind," see in it the great ele- 
ments of nature grandly presented and the cause of man- 
kind in its large passion, and the spirit of Shelley like 
the creative plastic stress itself that 

"Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there 
All new successions to the form they wear." 

Such are some of the ways in which Shelley entered into 
the life of men as Wordsworth entered into the life of 
nature, and leads the way for those who have hearts to 
follow. Dip in life, as he did, with honesty, with enthusi- 
asm, with faith, and whatever be the starting point at 
last you emerge on those craggy uplands of abstract and 
austere beauty and reason and righteousness and liberty 
and love — 

"Whereto our God himself is sun and moon;" — 



SHELLEY 159 

the fountain-heads whence flow all the streams of the 
ordered life of the vale. I have illustrated this process of 
life by the idea of the eye composing a picture; so the 
soul selects its most cherished desires and memories, 
and comes to be the soul of an artist, or a soldier, or an 
engineer, as the case may be. Let me vary the illustra- 
tion, and say that our problem is, in the presence of the 
world before us lying dull and crude and meaningless at 
first, to charge certain things in it with our own thought 
and feeling, and so to give them meaning; thus our 
familiar rooms of the house, and the fields round about it, 
for example, gain a power and meaning which is for us 
only; the stranger does not feel the welcome that the 
trees of the dooryard give to him who was born under 
them. But we find, as our minds go out into life, things 
already charged with emotion and thought, like the flag 
or the cross; and when the flag is brought to our lips and 
the cross to our breast, we feel the stored emotion of the 
nation^s life, the stored emotion of Christian sorrow, in 
the very touch of the symbol; life — the life of the world 
pours into us with power. And we find, again, ideas that 
are similarly already clothed with might — charged with 
the hearts of whole nations that have prayed for them, 
with precious lives that have died for them: 

"Names are there, nature's sacred watchwords" — 

liberty, truth, justice; and, if we possess our souls of 
them, the power of man flows into us as if we held elec- 
tric handles in our palms; beaded on the poet's verse, 
dropt from the lips of some rapt orator, they thrill us — 
and the instancy, the fervor, the inspired power that 
then wakes along our nerves is, we feel, the most au- 
thentic sign that we are immortal spirits. And men 



i6o THE TORCH 

there are, who seem like nuclei and central ganglions of 
these ideas, whose personality is so charged with their 
power that we idolize and almost worship them — what 
we call hero-worship. Such a man Shelley was, and is, 
to me. I remember as it were yesterday, when I was a 
freshman at Harvard, the very hour in that cold library 
when my hand first closed round the precious volume; 
and to this day the fragrant beauty of that blossomed 
May is as the birth of a new life; and when I read Words- 
worth's ode, — 

"Not in entire forgetfulness 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come" — 

I think of those first days with Shelley. To others it is 
some other book, some other man — Carlyle, Emerson, 
Goethe — whoever it may be : for the selective principle 
always operates to bring a man to his own; but in 
whatever way it comes about, the seeking mind gets con- 
nected with these men, books, ideas, S3mibols, through 
which it receives the stored race-force of mankind; so 
each of us, passing through the forms of developing life, 
receives the revelation of the world and of himself, grasps 
the world and is able to express himself through it, to 
utter his nature, not in language, but in being, in idea 
and emotion, and becomes more and more completely 
man, working toward that consummation, which I began 
by placing before you, of the time when the best that has 
anywhere been in the world shall be the portion of every 
man born into it. 

I must crave your patience for yet a final thought, 
which, though it may be hard to realize, yet, if it be re- 
alized only at moments, sheds light upon our days. Of 



SHELLEY i6i 

all the webs of illusion in which our mortality is en- 
meshed, time is the greatest illusion. This race-store, 
our inheritance, of which I have been speaking, which 
vitalized in our lives is race-power, is not a dead thing, a 
thing of the past; all that it has of life with us is living. 
Plato is not a thing of the past, twenty centuries ago; 
but a mood, a spirit, an approach to supreme beauty, by 
the pathway of human love; Spenser's ''Red Cross 
Knight" is not an Elizabethan legend, but the image of 
the Christian life to-day; and the hopes of man were not 
burnt away in the fire that consumed Shelley's mortal 
remains by the bright Mediterranean waves, nor do they 
sleep with his ashes by the Roman wall; they live in us. 
I have made much of the idea that all history is at last 
absorbed in imagination, and takes the form of the ideal 
in literature; it is a present ideal. We dip in life, as 
Shelley did, and we put on in our own personality these 
forms of which I have been speaking all along — forms 
of liberty, forms of beauty, forms of reason — of right- 
eousness, of kindliness, of love, of courtesy, of charity, 
of joy in nature, of approach to God — and these forms 
being present with us, eternity is with us ; they have been 
shaped in past ages by the chosen among men — by poets, 
by saints, by dreamers — by Plato, by Virgil, and Dante, 
by Shakespeare and Goethe, who live through them in us; 
except in so far as they so live in us, they are dust and 
ashes: Babylon is not more a grave. But these ideal 
forms of thought and emotion, charged with the life of 
the human spirit through ages, are here and now, a 
part of present life, of our lives, as our lives take on these 
forms; casting their shadows on time, they raise us, as by 
the hands of angels, up the paths of being — we are re- 
leased from the temporal, we lay hold on eternity, and 



1 62 THE TORCH 

entering on our inheritance as heirs of man's past glory, 
we begin to lead that life of the free soul among the things 
of the spirit, which is the climax of man's race-life and 
the culmination of the soul's long progress through 
time. 



THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 



Eight lectures on Poetic Energy, delivered 
before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1906 



I 

POETIC MADNESS 

Through all the space of years, from the morning 
of the world almost till yesterday, the poets were a race 
apart; mortal, they yet shed a celestial gleam; dying, 
they remained deathless; more than any other class of 
men they typified immortality. The Greeks, those origi- 
nators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of 
the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the 
priest, who was at best an intermediary between men 
and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and 
spoke. ^'For," said Socrates to Ion, "not by art does 
the poet sing, but by power divine. . . . God takes 
away the minds of poets and uses them as His ministers, 
as He also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that 
we who hear them may know them to be speaking not 
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state 
of unconsciousness, but that God Himself is the speaker, 
and that through them He is conversing with us." The 
poets themselves give the same testimony. Spenser says 
that poetry is "no art, but a divine gift and heavenly 
instinct, not to be gotten by labour and learning, but 
adorned with both; and poured into the witte by a cer- 
tain Enthousiasmos and celestiall inspiration." Shelley 
has the same doctrine in mind when he says, "Poetry 
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in 
man." Poetic energy, according to this view, is inspira- 

i6s 



1 66 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

tion, anciently conceived as a madness taking possession 
of the poet, and in more modern times as a divine prompt- 
ing of the reasonable soul. This is the unbroken tradi- 
tion of literature from the beginning with respect to the 
nature of poetic power. 

It is to be feared, however, that this doctrine to-day 
has little convincing force. Even in the words of Soc- 
rates there is a suspicion of irony, and perhaps Spenser 
and Shelley put more faith in their own words than ever 
their readers have done. Yet when all reservations have 
been made, there remain in the thoughts of all of us 
respecting poetry some glimmerings and decays, at least, 
of the idea of inspiration. It is the vogue nowadays, 
when any question is asked with regard to the soul, 
to apply first to the anthropologist; and, indeed, to 
inquire concerning the history of an idea is one of the 
best means to inform ourselves of its meaning. It might 
be pleasant to enter the charmed circle of the Greek 
myth, to listen for snatches of Lityerses' song like music 
before dawn, and have sight of Orpheus, a shining figure 
on the border of the morning; but such a procedure 
would only discredit our argument. It is necessary to 
go to the anthropologist and be wise. 

What does the student of primitive man tell of poetry 
at her birth? In place of the divine child, upon whose 
mouth bees clung in the cradle, what does the anthro- 
pologist show us? He shows us the dancing horde. 
"On festal occasions," says a recent writer, "the whole 
horde meets by night round the camp-fire for a dance. 
Men and women alternating form a circle; each dancer 
lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbors, and 
the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the left, 
while all the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the 



POETIC MADNESS 167 

foot that is advanced, and drag after it the other foot. 
Now with drooping heads they press closer and closer 
together; now they widen the circle. Throughout the 
dance resounds a monotonous song." The song is some- 
times one sound interminably repeated; sometimes it 
is more extended, as, for example, the words "Good 
hunting," or "Now we have something to eat," or 
"Brandy is good." In the undifferentiated, homogene- 
ous 3ocial state called the horde, there was no poet, 
just as there were no other men with particular callings; 
but all the horde were poets; and this, which I have 
read, was their poetry. Such is the anthropologist's ac- 
count, and it is a true account. Indeed, it is plain from 
the evidence that primitive men found many utilities 
in rhythmical expression. Rhythm was used to mark 
time in joint labor and on the march, as it is still 
employed by sailors, boatmen, and soldiers; the songs 
of labor and of war have this origin; and in that prime- 
val time, when language was hardly formed upon the 
lips of men, rhythm was the means by which the joint 
expression of emotion was effected on festive occasions. 
Rhythm was, so far as expression was concerned, the 
social bond. Lying on the sands at the base of the 
pyramids, or amid the ruins of Luxor, as the afternoon 
wore on, I have heard the chant begin among the throng 
of workmen, and as they hurried by with their baskets 
of earth it was no fancy for me to believe that in their 
shrill, unceasing, and ever louder cry I listened to the 
cradle hymn of poetry. 

If one looks at the matter more closely, the seeming 
gap between these sharply opposed conceptions of the 
divine poet and the singing and dancing horde begins 
to disappear. Greek tradition itself gives the clew to 



1 68 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

their reconciliation. Socrates, in the passage which I 
have quoted, compares the poet to the wild Bacchic 
revellers in their frenzy — that is, to what is no more 
nor less than the singing horde of Dionysus in their 
sacred orgy. The history of the Greek stage shows 
clearly how tragedy was developed from an original joint 
exercise about the altar of Dionysus, in which all united ; 
it was only by the gradual change of time that the 
assembly fell apart into the audience on one side and 
the performers on the other, and even then, you know, 
the chorus remained as the delegate of the whole as- 
sembly until in turn it also yielded to the ever increas- 
ing function of the actors, and theatrical individuality 
in dramatic performances was fully developed. With- 
out entering upon detail, the Greek tradition indicates 
the evolution of poetry from its social form as the joint 
rhythm of the horde to its individual form as the song 
of the divine poet who held all others silent when he 
discoursed. In this evolution the poetic energy itself 
remains the same, however much its form may change; 
whatever explanation may be given, whether it be re- 
garded as divine or human, the phenomenon is continuous 
and identical. 

The first radical trait of poetry throughout is the 
presence of emotion; and this to so marked a degree 
that it is characteristically described as madness. Civi- 
lized men sometimes forget the immense sphere of emo- 
tion in the history of the race. It is still familiar to us 
in the actions of mobs, in the blind fury or blind panic 
to wuich swarms of men are subject. In history we 
read of such emotion seizing on the people as in the 
time of the Flagellants, who went about scourging them- 
selves in the streets, or generally in periods of revolu- 



POETIC MADNESS 169 

tionary enthusiasm. Such emotion is known to us, also, 
in orgiastic or devotional dances, in the old-fashioned 
revivals, and in the fury of battle that possesses every 
nation when its chiefs have declared war. This is the 
broad emotional power in the race that is the fountain 
of poetry. Emotion is far older than intellect in human 
life; and even now reason plays but a faint and falter- 
ing part in human affairs. If in the civilized portions 
of the world the ungoverned outburst is less than it was, 
or seems less, it is mainly because in civilization emotion 
has found fixed channels. 

This emotion, which is the fountain of poetry, it should 
be observed, is the broad fund of life; it is nothing 
individual; it is always shared emotion. The second 
radical trait of poetic energy, therefore, is that it is social. 
The poet, however aloof he may be, is always in com- 
pany with the hearts that beat with his own heart, and 
like Saadi — 

"He wants them all, 
Nor can dispense 
With Persia for his audience:" 

for he is the voice of his people. In times past, and on 
the great scale of literary history, this is evident; nor 
is it less true of the most solitary lyrical poet of modern 
days than of the old dramatist or epic bard; for even 
that most secretive poetry, which we fitly say is "over- 
heard," has its value in proportion to its being overheard 
by the like-minded, whose minds it fills. The third trait 
of poetic energy, as seen in its continuous phenomena, 
is that it is controlled emotion. Rhythm is used from 
the beginning to control movement, as when two men 
strike alternately in a common work; or, as when rowers 



170 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

dip their oars together; or, as when the throng dances 
in chorus; and at the same time it governs the unisons 
of the emotional cries. Rhythm is the germ of art, its 
simplest form; and poetic art as distinguished from 
poetic energy may be defined as the principle of con- 
trol in the emotion in play. Poetic energy, then, as it 
appears historically, is shared and controlled emotion; 
it is primordial energy rising out of the vague of feeling; 
it is social; and for the principle of its control in general 
there is no better word than music, or harmony in the 
old, broad sense of that term. 

It is one of the difficulties, I fancy, of the staid New 
England folk who sit at the feet of Emerson, to find the 
sage affirming that the perfect state of life is ecstasy. 
From the beginning to the end he repeatedly announced 
this law; and by ecstasy he meant precisely what the 
Greeks meant by poetic madness. In his essay on poetry 
he puts his finger on the ailing place when he says 
that American poetry lacks abandonment, and he ex- 
tends the diagnosis to all American life when he exclaims : 
"O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad — this multitude 
of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, 
starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity 
to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay 
indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, 
of politics, or of money." In many passages Emerson 
thus pleads for the principle of the dervish, the maenad, 
the god-intoxicated man, in whatever sphere of life; the 
man who is self-abandoned to the energy of life that 
wells up within him, and in being ''passion's slave" finds 
his illumination and his enfranchisement. 

I know that it is common when the masters give ex- 
pression to such bewildering ideas to say that they did 



POETIC MADNESS 171 

not mean what they said, and to explain away the words 
by a liberal application of common sense. But it is 
more likely that the masters do not say half what they 
mean; for in such souls, living in a white heat of convic- 
tion, expression lags far behind their faith. It is but just 
to Emerson, however, to add that he had adopted the 
idea from others, and he naively remarks that it is singu- 
lar that our faith in ecstasy exists in spite of our almost 
total inexperience of it. The doctrine itself, neverthe- 
less, is one of the most persistent of human beliefs, and 
is always springing up in some quarter of the world. 

We have to do only with the fact that from the begin- 
ning to a late period of civilization poetic genius was 
identified with a certain madness. The poet was the 
heir of the wild and frenzied bands of Dionysus. In 
this case, however, the madness is slowly qualified. 
Whether poetic ecstasy is divinely inspired, whether it 
be the most perfect state of life, or whether it is only 
a survival from that period of exaltation which may 
have accompanied man's escape from brutish life, is 
not at present the question. It is not characterized by 
an unbalanced or diseased reason or by any temporary 
fury and aberration; it is characterized rather by a 
suspension of reason. The plain truth appears to be 
no more than that, in proportion to the degree of emo- 
tional excitement, the operation of the mind tends to 
become instinctive, and in the crisis of passion becomes 
wholly so. The two traits that most struck observers 
of poetic inspiration were its involuntary and its un- 
conscious character. The will is laid to sleep, and the 
mind works without conscious self-direction. Any lyri- 
cal poet, like Goethe, for example, is familiar with the 
process; he looks upon some scene with no thought of writ- 



172 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

ing verses, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the song sings 
itself in his brain, and his only part in it is to remember 
and write it down. It is not more strange in the case of 
a poet, whose brain is beat into rhythm, that a mood 
should so discharge itself in musical images than that 
when you sit down before the fire, vivid pictures should 
of themselves rise before your mind in revery. The 
spontaneous action of the mind, carrying with it oblivion 
of self, seems the essential factor in poetic inspiration, 
as it is known to us from the poets^ autobiographies. 
Emotion is the unloosed force; and always emotion tends 
to obliterate the reason, not only by dulling and destroy- 
ing the principle of caution, but also to such a degree 
that after the access of emotion has passed, words and 
even acts are brokenly, and sometimes not at all, re- 
called. 

It is to be borne in mind that emotion of this drifting 
and possessing sort is primary in human nature. It 
may well be that the state of primitive man was more 
dreamlike than we easily fancy, that as he emerged 
from the brute his mental state was still casual, lax, 
uncertain, subject to torpid intervals, and coursed by 
waves of panic fear and strange expectancy. The great 
effort of civilization has been, and still is, the attempt 
to introduce a principle of control into that casual swarm 
of impressions which makes up men's thought and of 
which, especially when swayed by emotion, spontaneous 
action is the law. The poet, then, under excitement, 
seems to present the phenomenon of a highly developed 
mind working in a primitive way; what is called his 
madness denotes nothing abnormal, but is rather an un- 
usually perfect illustration of the normal action of emo- 
tion in a pure form; he is mad in so far as he does not 



POETIC MADNESS 173 

call either will or reason to his aid, but allows unimpeded 
course to the instinctive expression of passion. 

Passion, then, is the birthright of the poet; without 
it he is nothing. That is why the poet works himself 
into the hearts of men; for emotion is fundamental in 
life; as a possession, as an energy, life has its value in 
its emotional moments. It is true that now for a long 
while we have tried to intellectualize life; it is the great 
aim of literary education. But the life that is led in 
thought, from history and travel and learning through 
all its compass, is life at secondhand. The reality lies, 
in general, in emotional contact. If two men exchange 
thoughts, they are fellow-beings; if they share an emo- 
tion, they are brother men. The poet comes, and either 
reflects or arouses emotion and shares the gift he brings, 
and is thus always and in all lands the dear comrade 
of men. Emotion is the fusing force which unites the 
poet with his fellow-men; but first in his own career it 
has united him with life. 

The mode in which it does so is simple. It is most 
plain in that part of experience which directly addresses 
the senses and is absorbed therein. The poet who is 
especially open to the things of nature, for example, 
to color and bloom and weather, to the motion of the 
seas and the infinity of the stars, to the exhilaration of 
a swim or a ride, does with his body drink the light of the 
world and the joy of existence. How many pages of the 
most welcome verse simply reflect this natural joy of 
living! It is not the image but the delight of the 
image, not the event but the joy of the event that 
exalts sensation into poetry. In a similar way emotion 
fuses the poet with ideas. The type is, of course, the 
fanatic who is so possessed with the idea that he becomes 



174 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

no more than its instrument and living embodiment. 
The revolutionary poets display this power with clear- 
ness; in the great songs of the French Revolution the 
Dionysiac quality, the presence of the mad throng, the 
singing horde, had its last great literary illustration; 
and wherever a poet sings the causes of mankind, there 
is this fanatical blending of his own soul with the idea. 
But whether in the senses or in the soul, emotion through- 
out the field is the life itself; thought is only the means 
of life; and even in the case where great thoughts, such 
as scientific conceptions, of themselves generate sublime 
emotion, the consummation of the thought is not in the 
knowledge but in the emotion. 

The sign of the poet, then, is that by passion he enters 
into life more than other men. That is his gift — the 
power to live. The lives of poets are but little known; 
but from the fragments of their lives that come down 
to us, the characteristic legend is that they have been 
singularly creatures of passion. They lived before they 
sang. Emotion is the condition of their existence; pas- 
sion is the element of their being; and, moreover, the 
intensifying power of such a state of passion must also 
be remembered, for emotion of itself naturally heightens 
all the faculties, and genius burns the brighter in its own 
flames. The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that 
consumes him, and only under this condition is he bap- 
tized with creative power. It is to be expected, there- 
fore, that the tradition of the poet's life should have an 
element of strangeness in it; and, in fact, to neglect those 
cases where genius has touched the border of actual 
madness, every poet has this stamp of destiny set upon 
him. There is always some wildness in his nature; he 
is apt to be roving, adventurous, unforeseen; he is with- 



POETIC MADNESS 175 

out fear, he is careless of his life, he is not to be com- 
manded; freedom is what he most dearly loves, and he 
will have it at any peril; that from which he will not be 
divided is the primeval heritage, the Dionysiac madness 
that resides not only in the instincts, but in all the facul- 
ties of man — the power and the passion to live. It 
is a widespread error, and due only to the academic 
second-hand practice of poetry, to oppose the poet to 
the man of action, or assign to him a merely contem- 
plative role in life, or in other ways deny reality to the 
poet's experience; intensity of living is preliminary to 
all great expression. From the beginning, about the 
rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, 
and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance 
of life ; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, 
the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that pas- 
sion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less 
richly charged. 

The poet seems always a lonely figure; but this is 
the paradox that the more lonely he is, the more he is a 
leader. The second trait of poetic energy is that it is 
a social power, and this is no whit less essential than its 
emotional basis. It is true that in early times poetic 
energy in its rude forms, as the rhythm of labor, of war, 
of the feast, had a larger social place and extended more 
widely over primitive life; it was not then individualized 
at all. Rhythm originally was more obviously the social 
bond, in joint movements of the throng, than it is now 
in the arts developed out of it — sculpture, music, and 
poetry. The greatness of all the arts, it has been widely 
and justly proclaimed, lies in their social character; in 
so far as they minister only to individuals they are steri- 
lized. Literature is the greatest of the arts because its 



176 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

social scope is most extended and most penetrating. 
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of 
race and a bond of union — great books are to the wan- 
dering souls of men; they are the Meccas of the mind. 
Homer was to Greece another Delphi. In the geography 
of the mind national literatures stand like mountain 
ranges, marking the great emotional upheavals of the 
race; such are the sacred books of all peoples; such was 
the literature of Greece, the glory that shone when rea- 
son came to birth among men; such were the outburst 
of Italian poetry and the particular periods of greatness 
in the modern literatures of Europe. Great literatures, 
in other words, are formed along the lines of fracture in 
the social advance of the race. It is true that supreme 
social value seems to belong rather to the books of past 
ages; but this is largely an error of perspective, for 
distance is essential to the measurement. The race is 
content to live long on the memory of such achievement; 
and the channels of social emotion on the great scale 
having been once worked out, the moods of men flow 
therein for a long age. 

The fixity of these ancient channels, too, is an essen- 
tial factor in the problem of poetic energy. Plato recom- 
mended that no poetry be allowed in the state except 
hymns of a fixed ceremonial character; and curiously 
the fact is that literature always tends to approach that 
state of tradition. Life everywhere hardens into formu- 
las; and thus in literature books become established 
as classics, schools of poetry become academic, expres- 
sion becomes formulistic. Emotion, that is, discharges 
itself through accustomed channels, through images and 
phrases and cadences that have become its known lan- 
guage; as, for example, was the case with that special 



POETIC MADNESS 177 

form of poetry known as Petrarchan. The emotion is 
genuine, but the form is old. When it has been shown 
that Shakespeare employed in his sonnets the conven- 
tional European expression of emotion, it has not been 
shown that the emotion was not genuine, but merely 
that the poet used a conventionalized art. How much 
of reality can exist in conventionalized art the whole 
early history of painting and sculpture shows. The ex- 
pression of emotion is generally conventional, and the 
more social it is, the more is it conventionalized. 

The poet, therefore, new born in the world, finds the 
field preoccupied. Religion, for example, is supplied 
with literary expression in its Bibles and hymns, and 
besides has the works of the other arts, architecture, 
sculpture, painting, and music, and in addition, the splen- 
dor and awe of its ritual. The national passion, patri- 
otism, finds embodiment for itself in long-established 
literature as well as in other ways. In fact, the poet 
finds social emotion already ritualized, if I may say so, 
in every part of life. He enters into no rivalry with the 
work which has already been accomplished by his pre- 
decessors; he rejoices in it, but it is not his work. It 
follows that the new poet is necessarily the exponent of 
emotion in new fields or turned toward new objects; he 
is an experimenter, as it were, in life; and this accounts 
often for his hard fate. If he is to be great, he is already 
on that line of fracture in social evolution of which I 
have just spoken. He sometimes stands in the light of 
an unrisen day. Hence, in his own time, he may appear 
even antisocial. How often has the poet been denounced 
as an atheist, as a revolutionist, an innovator, a wild 
thinker and rash actor, and always as a dreamer! It 
it because his natural habitat is there, in the new and 



178 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

unknown stir of the world coming to birth. It is al- 
together natural that he should be discredited, unrecog- 
nized or disowned, that he should go hungry and often 
starve, that he should die in poverty and neglect, that 
the very name of the poet in history should be a 
synonym for sorrow and want. This has been his 
lot in all ages, and if any poet has escaped it, he 
has done so by a miracle. The contrast between his 
poor and solitary state and his after fame is one of the 
fascinations that fasten the eyes of men upon him. It 
seems strange that a great social force should have resided 
in so despised an individual. But the world's work is 
not done in crowds, though crowds are the instruments 
and beneficiaries of it. Where the man of science in 
his lonely study or silent laboratory toils in secret, where 
Newton or Pasteur works, there the brain of the race 
thinks, and wins its slow advance on the unknown; and 
where the poet is though he be in the wilderness, there 
the heart of the race beats. The poet, born for the future, 
will be found always in the thick of ideas and in the heat 
of the glowing world of change; he takes into his single 
breast the rising mass, and shapes upon his lips in silence 
the master words of many thousand men. 

It might appear that the poet, who is thus a creature 
of passion and in the whirl of new social forces, is doomed 
to abide in a state of chaos; and the poet, in a certain 
sense, is the most lawless of men. Yet, as I have indi- 
cated, there is a principle of control; it is art. The 
original element of art is rhythm, that very measure of 
which the primitive cadence still times the poet's utter- 
ance; and it is true that the mere music of verse has a 
power of itself "in the very torrent, tempest, and whirl- 
wind of passion" to beget a temperance that gives it 



POETIC MADNESS 179 

smoothness. But art, though growing historically out 
of mere rhythm, is a broader principle, and as it grows, 
it becomes more and more an intellectual thing. In 
Nietzsche's phrase, this is Apollo's domain, the realm 
of intellect; for form is an intellectual thing. The 
dream, which accompanies emotion, is in truth its other 
and finite incarnation; it is the woof of color and image 
— all that is especially taken note of by the eye, which 
is the most intellectual of the senses, and by the under- 
standing, which is the eye of the mind; whether in its 
physical representation, which is woven of the senses, 
or in its bodiless conception, which belongs to the higher 
life of moral contemplation and abstract truth, it is the 
idea; and it is this accompanying dream, this idea, this 
form of art, which gives relief to the emotion, disburdens, 
and quiets it. 

The idea in this sense is the sphere of form; it is in 
this dream that the mind works, that art resides. It 
is this, too, that gives character to the emotion; for 
emotion is noble or base, wise or foolish, a power to 
save or a power to ruin, according to the objects and 
events toward which it is directed and the mode in which 
it envelops them. The development of the idea, the 
arrangement of its parts and phases, the order of the 
ode or the drama or the epic in unfolding its theme, is in 
poetry the labor of art; it is what composition is in sculp- 
ture or painting. This art, however, in the sense of a prin- 
ciple of control, has two modes; one lies in the dream it- 
self, in its original emanation from the mind, in its sub- 
stance; the other lies in its handling. The substance of the 
dream is one thing; the handling of it is another; and 
it is to the handling that what is called technique, the 
most conscious form of art, specially refers. It is to 



i8o THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

be borne in mind, however, that just as poetic energy 
is not something brought down from heaven, but is the 
fire and motion of Hfe itself, so the dream that attends 
emotion is not something artificially and arbitrarily 
united with it, but is given forth from it, and as natu- 
rally joined there as the flower to the root. Try as one 
may, one cannot in poetry — not even in its art — escape 
from the omnipresence of this secret power, the mystery 
that gives forth life, of that which is beneath all. It 
is one great use of works of art that they teach our eyes 
to see, even in nature and human life as they are, the 
beauty with which they are clothed in their actuality. 
Emotion, in its own natural expression, is a beautiful 
or pathetic or terrifying sight. There is an unconscious 
power in life itself to clothe its own emanation so; and 
of this power art is the follower in imagination. In the 
poet this instinctive power in himself gives the dream, 
the substance; he cannot tell how it arises in him; it 
comes as the smile comes to the lips or tears to the eyes 
— he knows not whence they are; and, furthermore, he 
is not yet the poet, but only the novice, if his technical 
skill is not also instinctively applied and the arrange- 
ment of the theme instinctively accomplished. In the 
stroke of genius there is no calculation. The poet does 
not scan his verses nor hunt his rhymes, any more than 
the musical composer seeks for concords; still less does 
he search for color and image and idea. He is as un- 
conscious of his processes, even when originally acquired 
with difficulty, as the athlete is of the play of his 
muscles. The mastery of technique is, indeed, necessary 
to the novice, but it is only the tuning of the instru- 
ment; conscious art must pass into the hand, the eye, 
the brain, the heart, and there be forgotten, nor does it 



POETIC MADNESS i8i 

become true power until it is so forgotten. The dream, 
the idea, both in its substance and its handling, its con- 
stituting form and its technique, is, in the work of genius, 
instinctive; unless it be so, it is flawed and incomplete. 
Art is a perfect principle of control only when it thus 
operates, as rhythm does, like a law of nature, from 
which, in fact, it is not to be distinguished; for it is that 
secret law of harmony unveiled in man's nature. 

Poetic energy, so conceived, is a phenomenon of the 
spiritual nature of man, and is ruled, both in emotion and 
in idea, by its own inward law. The passion of life em- 
bodies itself in all men according as they have the power 
to live, in experience; and in the poets it embodies itself in 
imagination. The passion of life, which is the great 
mystery of the universe, shapes unto itself many forms 
in different ages, in different climes, under different gods. 
It has many births; and the miracle of this mystery is 
the diversity of these births, the novelty and surprise 
of each new morning as it breaks upon a world whose 
law is death and which is forever passing away. I said 
that the poet is the most lawless of men; that is because 
he lives in an ampler law, because the life that is born 
in him refuses to be bound in the old births of time; 
he breaks all conventions, he tramples on all supersti- 
tions, he violates all barriers; for he brings his own world 
with him, and new horizons. Emerson said that the 
birth of a poet is the chief event in chronology. He 
means that they mark the great changes in the minds 
of men. Wherever such a change is nigh, wherever the 
flame of life bursts forth with most power and splendor, 
there the poet is found; he is the morning and the 
evening star of civilizations. He is but one among men, 
but in his single soul the soul of mankind comes to fullest 



i82 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

consciousness of itself and is illuminated from horizon 
to horizon, from height to depth. He seems to men 
divine because he thus gives to them the divine part 
of themselves. His fame may be swift or slow, but in 
the end it fills the world. He is lawless, judged by the 
finite; but in his passion and his dream he has given 
himself to a higher law, and reposes on the infinite, of 
which he is the latest birth. So it seems to him. In 
these lectures I shall present the genius of six of these 
poets as illustrations of that passion and power of Hfe 
in which poetic energy consists. 



II 

MARLOWE 

Marlowe is the very type of the poet whom I have 
described. "Mad" is the first epithet that comes to 
our lips in thinking of him — "mad Marlowe," — : 
whether one looks at the wildness of his unregulated 
career or at the tameless force embodied in his genius or 
at the romantic extravaganza that is the body of his 
literary achievement. Brief and tragic were the annals 
of his life. He was born two months before Shakespeare; 
son of the shoemaker at Canterbury; educated at school 
and college; a scholar when he came down from Cam- 
bridge to London, which he entered the same year with 
Shakespeare; favored by the theaters and the public; 
a wild liver, impulsive, passionate, uncontrolled, giving 
his genius free way with himself for the eight years of 
his manhood during which he did his work; faithful to 
his intellectual part and industrious as he must have been 
to have accomplished all that he did; and killed in a 
tavern brawl at the age of thirty. This is all that we 
know of him; yet in every line of this story one knows 
that it is the epitaph of genius. He was in his own day 
denounced as an atheist and blasphemer, and his death 
was long cited as a notable instance of God^s sudden 
justice. "Not inferior to these," says one account, "was 
one Christopher Marlow, by profession a play-maker, 
who, as it is reported, about 14 years ago wrote a book 
against the Trinity. But see the effects of God's justice! 

183 



i84 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

It so happened that at Detford, a little village about 
three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab 
with his ponyard one named Ingram that had invited 
him hither to a feast and was then playing at tables, he 
quickly perceiving it so avoided the thrust that withal, 
drawing out his dagger for his defense, he stabbed this 
Marlow into the eye in such a sort that, his braines 
coming out at the dagger's point, he shortly after died. 
Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work 
the end of impious atheists." So runs the Puritan's ac- 
count of this tragic episode; and it is altogether likely 
that Marlowe, lawless in all ways, was a free-thinker, and 
being a child of the Italian Renaissance was then intel- 
lectually what was called Machiavellian in his ideas. 

Notwithstanding this grewsome picture of the atheist's 
bloody death, it was not thus that the poets of that age 
saw the protagonist of their company who brought in 
*'the spacious times of great Elizabeth." Their tributes 
to his memory make us aware of an exceptional quality 
in the man, of the burning of a fire in him such as no 
other of his comrades knew the touch of, of something 
that transfigured him; and this transfiguration is seen 
in the fact that he alone of all that group was idealized 
by them in fancy. The poets brought flowers as if to 
hide the corpse of that grisly memory of his death. It 
is much that he who lay there was Shakespeare's ^'dead 
shepherd." The other lesser poets, whenever they speak 
of him, are instinctively touched with imaginative fan- 
tasy. Chapman, invoking the Muse, bids her seek Mar- 
lowe's spirit, and after death 

"find the eternal clime 
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood 
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood"; 



MARLOWE 185 

and in the flowing line we seem to feel the full flood of 
that stream of poetry as it broke forth in its own age. 
Drayton's oft-quoted words transmit the strange fire that 
was in the young poet's whole frame like a second soul: — 

"Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs, 
Had in him those brave translunary things 
That the first poets had; his raptures were 
All air and fire which made his verses clear; 
For that fine madness still he did retain 
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain." 

Personal fascination survives in this description — the 
transcendency of genius, seen, felt, touched, as it were, 
in its mortal body by mortal senses. Still another youth- 
ful poet, like Chapman, following the spirit with praise 
after death, 

"where Mario's gone 
To live with beauty in Elyzium," 

gives us the contemporary glow of enthusiasm for Mar- 
lowe's eloquent and musical fancy: — 

"Whose silver-charming tongue moved such delight 
That men would shun their sleep in still dark night 
To meditate upon his golden lines." 

It is by the light of such tributes as these that we 
recall and re-create the young poet, — in his rise the star 
of the Elizabethan morning, in his tragic fall, as Lowell 
called him, "the herald that dropped dead in announcing 
the victory in whose fruits he was not to share." 

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, 
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough," 

we cry; the sense of the limitless power and suggestion of 
genius blends with the accident of its extinction in its first 



1 86 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

burst — the pathos of what was never to be, the tragedy 
of a soul of price lost to mankind; and with this mood 
dumbly mingles the universal feeling of some darkness in 
poetic fate, and obtains mastery of the heart and controls 
insensibly the judgment. To all later poets, as to his 
contemporaries, Marlowe is a younger brother, struck 
by the shaft of unkind gods; something of that trans- 
figuration that his fellows saw — the silver flood of 
beauty about him, the miraculous fire within him — still 
lingers, and he stays to abide our question rather in his 
spirit, in the might of unaccomplished resources, than in 
any created work that came from his hand. 

One work there is, however, in which his youthful- 
ness stands revealed, his tastes and sensibilities, the 
richness of his emotions, and the warmth of his life. 
The translation he made after Moschus, called ^'Hero 
and Leander," gave to English hterature its single work 
of the pagan paradise, and it shows such an endowment 
of the soul and body of passion in the hand that wrote 
it and the heart that brooded it, as leaves its young 
author among English poets without a rival for sensuous 
happiness. The poem still stands alone; neither its 
mood nor its music has ever since been heard in Eng- 
land. It was plainly this poem that clothed Mar- 
lowe with that atmosphere of the golden age in which 
his brother poets saw him stand. By it he became for 
them the heir of classic beauty and the living token ^i 
that voluptuousness in the joys of the imagination which 
was the poetic charm of the Italian Renaissance; and 
to them he stood forth like an inhabitant of that fair 
realm, native to that air, and mixed with the figures and 
the landscape of his own vision. We can realize only 
faintly the power with which this great movement, the 



MARLOWE 187 

Renaissance, the new and second birth of man's intellect 
and sense, came upon the nations of the West; with what 
vital surprise, what energizing force, what kindling im- 
pulses along the nerves of will and desire, with what 
intoxication of intellectual curiosity and artistic passion, 
this renovation of life in Italy fell in the second century 
of its accumulated mass, and made impact through a 
thousand channels on such an age as Elizabeth's and on 
such a fiery and sensitive temperament, such an origina- 
tive and shaping genius as Marlowe's. This little poem, 
nevertheless, is like a single blossom from that world- 
wide field, and may give us the hue and fragrance of the 
Renaissance in flower, if we will: so a rose shadows us 
with Persia, or a single lotus blossom unbosoms all the 
Nile. 

One quality the poem has, which specially charac- 
terizes it as Marlowe's handiwork — an excitement of 
the imagination resulting in exuberance of fancy, a 
stream of decorative art, an incessant welling up of 
imagery and epithet in profuse and exhaustless abun- 
dance; no poem is so fluent, so effortless, so negligently 
rich in this regard, so prodigal in its spending of the 
coin of fancy. In that age when all the seas first yielded 
to man, imagination, too, made her voyages of discovery, 
and brought home gold and pearl and the marvel of the 
loom from every clime; many a passage in the poets of 
those days is a museum in itself; and of this rifled wealth 
of the Elizabethan world, heaped from antique and 
oriental sources and every quarter of learning or of 
fable, Marlowe was a master. In "Hero and Leander" 
he showed only his prentice hand in this lavish piracy. 
It is, nevertheless, even there a sign of that overflowing- 
ness which stamped his genius from the first as of a royal 



i88 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

nature. He had neither to search nor to hoard, but only 
to spend. It was not, however, in a love episode, a few 
hundred lines in length, however stored with langour 
and beauty, that he was to show his wealth, but on the 
broad stage of England. The poet, nevertheless, was 
prior to the dramatist in Marlowe, as indeed all the Eliza- 
bethans were poets first and dramatists afterwards; and 
it was this poet, the child of Italy and the Hellespont 
breathing English air, that his brother poets loved and 
immortalized, before ever his greater fame as the first 
fashioner of a noble and lofty style for English drama 
was even dreamed of. 

I own that the early English drama has caused me 
much weariness even in my youthful days, and neither 
would I now voluntarily read it, nor should I have the 
heart to subject any other to the trial. For men of 
English speech the drama is necessarily measured by 
Shakespeare; and in a certain sense he raises his fellows 
to his own neighborhood. So, when one stands upon 
the highest summit of some many-folded range of hills, 
the mere loftiness of his station makes the lower crowns, 
distinct and bold beneath him, seem little inferior; but 
when, on the other hand, descending, he makes one of 
them his perch, how the lonely monarch soars aloft! 
Thus it is when from Shakespeare's height men survey 
his fellows, the swelling names of that Elizabethan cluster. 
^'Marlowe," they say, "on whose dawn-flushed brow the 
morning clouds too soon crept with envious vapors that 
the most golden of Apollo's shafts should never pierce 
more; Beaumont and Fletcher, twins of the summer 
noontide, and Chapman bearing his weight of forests 
with the ease and might of old Titans; Ford and Web- 
ster who made their home with the tempest and seemed 



MARLOWE 189 

to leash the thunder;" and so on with all the others of the 
tremendous upheaval of the age. But when one leaves 
Shakespeare's ground, and descends to any of these, 
how tumid is all such description, while undiminished 
the king of the peaks still soars in the sky! It is not 
by our will that Shakespeare's altitude is made the 
measure of other men who were so unfortunate as to be 
born his rivals; one can help it no more than the eye 
can help seeing. His genius reduced all his contempo- 
raries to perpetual subjection to itself; no superlatives 
can be offered in their praise except by his leave, and 
when their own worth is made known, the last service 
they do, in showing us how invaluable is Shakespeare's 
treasure, is perhaps the most useful. 

Even Marlowe, in whose youth, if anywhere in history, 
was the promise of a mate for Shakespeare, needs the 
latter's withdrawal before he can tread the stage. Some 
would say possibly that Shakespeare might not have ob- 
tained entrance there with Lear and Othello, if Marlowe 
had not first fitted the tragic buskin to the high step 
of Tamburlaine; and in a sense the retort is just. The 
highest genius avails itself of those who go before to 
prepare the way, the road-makers building the paths of 
speech and opening the provinces of thought; but to be 
forced to stipulate at the outset that a great name in 
literature, such as Marlowe's, shall be considered only 
with reference to his turn in historical development is 
to make a confession of weakness in the cause; it is to 
forego his claim to be considered as a writer of universal 
literature. What the difference is, in Marlowe's case, 
is tersely indicated by the fact that competent students 
discern his genius in "Titus Andronicus," which in 
Shakespeare's crown is rather a foil than a gem. This 



igo THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

play, with Marlowe's touch still on it, would illustrate, 
if compared with Shakespeare's undoubted work, how 
cumbrous and stiffening were the shackles of the stage 
tradition from which Shakespeare freed the art. But in 
Marlowe's accredited dramas, say, in "Doctor Faustus" 
(to lay aside the rant of 'Tamburlaine" as merely initia- 
tory, tentative, and facile) the necessities of contempo- 
raneous taste and usage are so tyrannical as almost to 
ruin the work for any other age. "Doctor Faustus" is 
a series of slightly connected scenes from the life of a 
conjuror, in which thaumaturgy and the hatred of the 
Papacy are made to furnish comic horseplay of a clown- 
ish kind; or else fear of the devil is used to freeze the 
blood of the spectators with the horns, hoofs, and fire 
of coarse horror. Of the dramatic capabilities of the 
Faust legend as a whole Marlowe indicates no percep- 
tion. He caught the force of two situations in it — the 
invocation of Helen's shadow and the soliloquy; but 
though in treating these he exhibited genius as bold, 
direct, and original as Shakespeare's own, they are merely 
fragmentary. Except in these scenes in which Mar- 
lowe's voice really quells his time and sounds alone in 
the theater, the uproar of the pit frightens away the 
Muse and leaves comedy and tragedy alike to the ruth- 
less disfigurement of the early English stage. In "The 
Jew of Malta," even if the first two acts are fashioned 
by dramatic genius as no other but Shakespeare could 
have molded them, the last three taper off into the tail 
of the old monster that had flopped and shuffled on the 
medieval boards on every saint's day. In "Edward II'* 
alone is there drama, properly speaking; it is complete, 
connected, sustained, and it has tenderness, passion, and 
pathos; but though Swinburne gives it the palm in cer- 



MARLOWE 191 

tain particulars over Shakespeare^s "Richard II," which 
was modeled after it, the former will not bear compari- 
son with the latter in dramatic grasp. To notice but 
one difference; in Marlowe's work the king's favoritism 
is so much an infatuation and a weakness that he loses 
sjmipathy, and his dethronement, apart from its brutal 
miseries, is felt to be just; while in Shakespeare Rich- 
ard's favoritism is retired far in the background, and his 
faith in his divine right to the crown (never insisted 
on by Edward) is so eloquent, and so pervades and 
qualifies the whole play, that when the king is murdered, 
one is driven to believe that the bishop's denunciation 
of God's vengeance on the usurping Lancaster must 
prove true prophecy. In the matter of dramatic hand- 
ling there can be no doubt of Shakespeare's more expert 
sense, though his ideality may make the characterization 
appear, as it does to Swinburne, less sharp. "Edward 
II" is Marlowe's best play; but, with this exception, his 
dramas in general are deeply engaged in the rawness of 
the time, dependent in many scenes on vulgar spectacle 
and buffoonery, on burlesque and rout and horror, Tam- 
burlaine's chariot drawn by captive kings in harness, the 
nose of Barabas, which passed into a proverb for its 
enormousness, and similar features. So much must be 
allowed, lest the unwary making acquaintance with these 
plays should find but strange entertainment. Marlowe, 
as a dramatist, is not to be judged apart from his his- 
torical moment; nor are his works to be appreciated 
intelligently except by the student of the dramatic de- 
velopment of our stage. 

But notwithstanding the crudity of Marlowe's works, 
as wholes, every page proclaims the transcendency of the 
genius, of the poetic energy, there at work. It is an 



192 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

energy that has a volcanic lift, splendid, terrifying, filling 
heaven. Marlowe's great achievement, in the age of 
discoveries and rediscoveries, which blending together, 
constituted a renewal of man's life and brought a new 
world into being, was to rediscover the main source, 
the fountainhead, of dramatic power. He rediscovered 
passion, which is the substance of poetry, and made it 
the substance of the drama. He sympathized with great 
passions; and in order to sympathize with them he had 
first to be capable of great passions; that was his endow- 
ment. The first and abiding impression he makes upon 
the reader is that of power — of the presence in his 
bosom of the Dionysiac daemonic force, — life clothing 
itself in restless creative faculty and calling new worlds 
into being in the intellectual sphere. He was a creator, 
and the clay he used was humanity, the human spirit, 
the soul. The Renaissance restored to man the dignity 
of human nature, gave the human spirit back to itself 
as a power of life. It unveiled the great achievement 
of antiquity in literature, in sculpture and architecture, 
in empire, and, perhaps most notably of all, in men. 
Nothing is more significant of the mood of the age than 
the regard in which Plutarch was held. Plutarch was, 
as it were, a resurrection of the mighty dead of Greece 
and Rome. The human soul had been capable of such 
lives, and of such works as the poets and philosophers 
and artists had wrought in classical times. The ex- 
ample was like a trumpet call; what man had done and 
been, man could still be and do. The romantic nations, 
Italy, France, Spain, and England, broke into sudden 
flower of literature and art and life, as when the sun in 
its northing clothes the whole hemisphere with spring- 
time, and the force of nature is unloosed like a flood. 



MARLOWE 193 

and belts the planet with new warmth and verdure. It 
is this unloosing of human faculty that characterizes the 
age; it was a broader phenomenon than we are apt to 
think; Shakespeare was but an incident in it. 

This force was unloosed in Marlowe; to him, in his 
awakening, came the sense of the greatness of man, the 
miracle of human power, the desire to possess his soul 
of this greatness, to be in himself this miracle — the 
passion of life. Young scholar though he was and hardly 
fledged from college, he had got more than an education; 
he had found his mind. If he wrote a book against the 
Trinity, as was alleged, it is a fact that is certainly not 
recorded of any other of his fellows, and shows a phil- 
osophical interest, a mentality, different in kind from 
theirs. He was endowed with sensuousness and the 
warm delight in beauty, that is the rarest of English 
poetic traits and little welcome in that sluggish climate; 
he was also endowed with mind; but beneath both en- 
dowments lay that deep desire to live, that consciousness 
of the power to live, that passion to realize his desire in 
power, and for which there was no other pathway for 
him than the roads of the imagination. It was natural 
that what was most borne in upon his mind, the great- 
ness of man and the presence in man's soul of all that 
potent faculty of which Greece and Rome and Italy were 
the form and impression, of which the freshly opened 
lands and seas, east and west, bore the promise of new 
world-careers — it was natural, I say, that this height 
of human nature which was foremost in his sense of life 
should be cardinal in his imaginative brooding whence 
issued the romantic dreams of his mind. 

He first seized on the most obvious embodiment of 
human greatness, military empire^ and on the prime bar- 



194 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

baric passion, lust of dominion — on power in its most 
simple and sensual form, the power of the conqueror; 
he set forth in ^Tamburlaine" the career of resistless vic- 
tory ridden by a master of the world. Tamburlaine him- 
self proclaims that mastery of inexhaustible ambition 
which is proper to man: — 

^'Nature that framed us of four elements, 
Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: 
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world. 
And measure every wandering planet's course, 
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
And always moving as the restless spheres, 
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, 
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all. 
That perfect bliss and sole felicity, 
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." 

For Tamburlaine the crown was the summit, but in the 
larger yearning of the speech, in such a line as 

"Still climbing after knowledge infinite," 

is the keynote of Marlowe's mood in all ways. The 
drama itself is an unchecked torrent of words, a flood of 
large language; it has an imperial breadth of flow, and 
bears the kingdoms like islands on its stream. It has 
become a synonym for bombast, but it excites and ampli- 
fies the imagination by its spaciousness, its epithets like 
"the hundred-headed Volga," and its terrible energy. 
There are many splendid passages of impassioned dic- 
tion, many noble lines such as only the greatest masters 
know the secret of; but I can best convey to you that 
quality which I wish to bring out — the new Eliza- 



MARLOWE 195 

bethan sense of the largeness of the earth and of the 
dream of empire over it — by the scene in which Tam- 
burlaine at his death calls for the map of the world. 

"But I perceive my martial strength is spent. 
In vain I strive and rail against those powers 
That mean to invest me in a higher throne . . . 
Give me a map; then let me see how much 
Is left for me to conquer all the world . . . 
Here I began to march toward Persia, 
Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea, 
And thence unto Bithynia, where I took 
The Turk and his great empress prisoners. 
Thence marched I into Egypt and Arabia; 
And here, not far from Alexandria, 
Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet, 
Being distant less than full a hundred leagues, 
I meant to cut a channel to them both. 
That men might quickly sail to India. 
From thence to Nubia near Borno lake, 
And so along the ^Ethiopean Sea, 
Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn, 
I conquered all as far as Zanzibar. 
Then by the northern part of Africa, 
I came at last to Graecia, and from thence 
To Asia, where I stay against my will : — 
Which is, from Scythia where I first began. 
Backwards and forwards, near five thousand leagues. 
Look here, my boys ; see what a world of ground 
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line 
Unto the rising of this earthly globe; 
Whereas the sun, declining from our sight, 
Begins the day with our Antipodes! 
And shall I die, and this unconquered? 
Lo, here, my sons, are all the golden mines, 
Inestimable drugs and precious stones, 
More worth than Asia and the world beside ; 
And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold 



196 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

As much more land, which never was descried, 
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright 
As all the lamps that beautify the sky! 
And shall I die, and this unconquered?" 

In this passage we are in the world that Columbus and 
the great voyagers discovered, and breathe its air as fresh 
as in those Elizabethan mornings when the wonder was 
still on it. 

In "The Jew of Malta" Marlowe selected the second 
primary passion of man, the lust for gold, and he made 
Barabas a type of the love of wealth, as prodigal as was 
Tamburlaine of the love of empire. He it was from 
whose lips dropped the line 

''Infinite riches in a little room," 

and illustrated it by that glittering hoard which shows in 
fewest words the lavishness that is a constant trait of 
Marlowe: — 

"Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts. 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price 
As one of them indifferently rated . . . 
May serve in peril of calamity 
To ransom great kings from captivity." 

The passion of the Jew, like that of the conqueror, is 
single and alone. Marlowe desired a more unlimited 
play for the soul's infinite capacity, and in "Doctor 
Faustus" he showed that multiple thirst, which was the 
very image of the Renaissance, that thirst to exhaust all 
natures by possessing them, which only the secrets of 
magic could satisfy and allay, but which was a passion 
so deep-seated that the scholar would barter his soul 



i 



MARLOWE 197 

in exchange for that means of power. At this price 
Faustus obtained the satisfaction of every wish and was 
as supreme in this empire of the mind as Tamburlaine 
had been in the kingdoms of the world. 

Infinite empire, infinite riches, infinite satisfaction of 
desire, are thus the three great themes of Marlowe, in 
these most characteristic plays; the desire, the passion, 
and the power of life on a grand scale filled his mind, 
and gave his imagination that grandiloquence which is 
the trait by which he is most eminent in men's memories. 
He had thus discovered passion as the substance of the 
drama, and had created great embodiments of it in char- 
acters that remain types never to be forgotten of the 
passion he delineated in each. To put the fact in a differ- 
ent way, he was the first great psychologist in English 
drama; he created psychology in it as a dramatic theme. 
He conceived these primary passions somewhat simply 
and abstractly, elementally; but in these plays he had 
already begun to find the counterfoil to passion, which 
is the other half of dramatic art, namely, the event; and 
as he went on in his art, and grasped the interplay of pas- 
sion and circumstance which makes tragedy whole and 
complete, as an image of human life, he guided the art 
into its proper element, history. That was his second 
great achievement as a fashioner of the drama in his day. 
In the earlier plays he had given passion its career in 
an ideal world; in "Edward II" he seized upon it in its 
confining bounds of history, and his work at once gained 
complexity and reality, or what is called probability; it 
became lifelike. It must be acknowledged that there is 
more vitality in "Edward II" than in Shakespeare's more 
expert development of the same theme in "Richard II." 
Richard suffers in his imagination, in his kingship, in 



igS THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

his idea of himself; but Edward suffers in his heart, and 
is in all ways warmer, tenderer, more manly. It was by 
this resort to history as the element of human drama that 
Marlowe obtained this vitality in the characters and ac- 
tuality in the events; and by his example he put into 
Shakespeare's hands his 'prentice work in the historical 
plays, as he had already directed his interest to the psy- 
chology of the human spirit and the career of great pas- 
sions in exalted types of the imagination. Marlowe was 
in these ways the forerunner, not only of Shakespeare, 
but of the dramatic age. 

Marlowe performed another service, not only for the 
drama, but for English literature, and one that is for- 
ever associated with his name. He gave to English 
poetry its best instrument of expression — blank verse. 
It is true that blank verse had been used before and upon 
the stage; but it was Marlowe's distinction to develop 
the melody and rhetoric of blank verse, to give it elo- 
quence, ardor, and passion, to make it throb and live; 
and from him, again, Shakespeare took it and through 
successive years molded and shaped it, made it flexible 
and plastic, till it became the most vital form of English 
speech. In Marlowe the line is still in its elementary 
stage; its value is there, but its value is often too ex- 
clusively a monotone and too frequently merely sonorous; 
the repetition is tedious, the sound is swelling and bom- 
bastic; on the other hand, it should be remembered that 
this sounding and gorgeous oratory, together with the 
eloquence and rhetoric, the excess of rich detail, the pic- 
turesqueness and ornament, the lavish fancy, all taken 
in one, was a means of securing that illusion of the imagi- 
nation of which the bare and ill-furnished scenic stage 
of Elizabeth stood so greatly in need. In a certain way 



MARLOWE 199 

this ranting and profuse language was a substitute for 
scenery, and helped to give the necessary elevation to 
the mimic stage. In his employment of blank verse, 
too, Marlowe showed the same rapid progress in the 
power of his art that distinguished him in characteriza- 
tion and in plot; and as he became accustomed to the 
measure, he dissolved its original monotone, broke it 
up into true melody, while at the same time he gathered 
temperance and kept nearer to the natural language of 
high passion, as in the great scenes of "Edward II" and 
of "Doctor Faustus.'' In all this, as in the rest of his 
art, he was a bold experimenter and learned by doing; 
but just as there was a gift of nature which underlay his 
sympathy with great passions, that Dionysiac daemonic 
force within himself, so there was a gift of nature be- 
neath his "mighty line." Style, the power and the feel- 
ing for noble language, was born in him; that aliquid 
immensum infinitumque that Cicero desired in the ora- 
tor was innate in Marlowe; it was not merely the large 
words and rolling cadences upon his lips, but throughout 
the poet's make there was the sense and feeling of the 
infinite, seen at the lowest in the profusion of his fancy, 
and at the highest in the reach of his imagination in his 
great tragic scenes, but most apparent and condensed 
perhaps in that passage on poetic expression which no 
lover of Marlowe can forbear to quote, though it be 
familiar: 

"If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts. 
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts. 
Their minds, and muses on admired themes; 
If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
From their immortal flowers of poesy 



200 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit: — 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combined in beauty's worthiness. 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest." 

The feeling of the inexpressible, which is in literature the 
sense of the infinite, was never told with more heart-felt 
conviction than in these lines. The style of Marlowe, 
as lofty as it is rich, where every line brims to the 
rim with melody or beauty or high feeling, is such as 
belongs to the man. It was Shakespeare's best fortune 
that he caught the golden cadence of his youth from 
such a master's lips. 

Marlowe died at the age of thirty, and left this mem- 
ory of himself which for splendor and beauty is fitly 
symbolized by the image of the morning star which has 
been so freely applied to him. It is not because of the 
perfection of his works that he is remembered; he left 
no single work of the first rank; a developed art is the 
prerequisite of great literature. He did not so much 
create great works as he rather originated the art itself 
by which great works should in their time be accom- 
plished. I have indicated the specific service he thus 
rendered by concentrating the drama on passion, by send- 
ing it to history to school, and by giving it the instru- 
ment of blank verse; but I have not meant thereby to 
trace his historical significance, but to show forth more 
fully the strength that was in him, the immense poetic 
energy of which his genius was the phenomenon. He 
had the warmth and susceptibility of a youthful poet, 
but he had also a greatness of soul which we associate 



MARLOWE 20I 

with more manly years. He was an emanation of the 
Renaissance, one of that new brood of men which was 
like a new creation in the ranks of the angels of power. 
He was a forward-looking spirit; no fiber in him looked 
backward to the past; he was revolutionary. He was 
full of mastership; no part of his nature went in leash 
to any power in heaven or on earth; he was free. He 
was lawless, even, as it is the lot of genius to be because 
of the prophetic element in it by which it belongs to a 
world not yet come into being. More than any of his 
fellows, more even than Shakespeare to me, he seems 
self-absorbed in his own other world of imaginative art, 
and living there as in his own bright, particular star. 
He is the very type of genius, as I have said, — the 
naked form of it — as bright, as beautiful, as neglectful 
of mankind, as free from any regards of earth as an 
antique statue that gives to our eyes the mortal aspect 
of a god. 



Ill 

CAMOENS 

Camoens, the maker of the only truly modern epic, 
offers an illustration of poetic power which is to me one of 
the most interesting, although the foreignness of his sub- 
ject-matter and the extraordinary lameness of its Eng- 
lish translations make difficult obstacles to our apprecia- 
tion; but for that very reason he has the happiest fortune 
that can fall to a poet in the fact that familiarity ever 
endears him the more. He is a less pure type of the 
flame of genius than Marlowe; poetic energy appears 
in him less a spiritual power dwelling in its own realm of 
imagination; but, on the other hand, his career admits 
us to a nearer view of a poet's human life, to what ac- 
tually befalls the man so doubtfully endowed with that 
inward passion of life, in the days and weeks and years 
of his journey. Scarce any poet is so autobiographical 
in the strict sense. Others have made themselves the 
subject of their song; but usually, like Shelley, they 
exhibit an ideal self seen under imaginative lights and 
through the soul's atmosphere, and in these self-por- 
traits half the lines are aspiration realized, the self they 
dream of; but Camoens shows in his verse as he was in 
life, with a naturalness and vigor, with an unconscious 
realism, a directness, an intensity and openness that give 
him to us as a comrade. 

He was of the old blue blood of the Peninsula, the 

203 



204 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Gothic blood, the same that gave birth to Cervantes. 
He was blond, and bright-haired, with blue eyes, large 
and lively, the face oval and ruddy — and in manhood 
the beard short and rounded, with long untrimmed 
mustachios — the forehead high, the nose aquiline ; in 
figure agile and robust; in action "quick to draw and 
slow to sheathe," and when he was young, he writes that 
he had seen the heels of many, but none had seen his 
heels. Born about the year 1524, of a noble and well- 
connected family, educated at Coimbra, a university 
famous for the classics, and launched in life about 
the court at Lisbon, he was no sooner his own master 
than he fell into troubles. He was a lover born, 
and the name of his lady, Caterina, is the first that 
emerges in his life; for such Romeo-daring he was ban- 
ished from court when he was about twenty, whether 
after a duel or a stolen interview is uncertain; and on 
his return, since he continued faithful to his lady, he 
was sent into Africa, and in an engagement with pirates 
in the Straits of Gibraltar he lost his right eye. He 
fought the IMoors for three years until he was twenty- 
five, and returning to Lisbon, enlisted for the Indies; 
but in consequence of a street affair with swords in which 
he drew in defense of some masked ladies and unfortu- 
nately wounded a palace servant, he was held in prison 
three years. Eleven days after his release he sailed, 
and it is not unlikely that his sailing was a condition of 
his release. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope and 
came to India, where he served in campaigns and garri- 
son, and occasionally held official appointments, and 
from time to time fell into prison. He cleared himself 
from all charges of wrong-doing in office; but he was of 
the type that makes both enemies and friends. He was 



CAMOENS 205 

outspoken, and he indulged his mood in satire, a dan- 
gerous employment in the narrowness of colonial and 
army life. On the other hand, he was a brave and gentle 
comrade and delighted in manly traits; and so there was 
a round of companions in arms to whom he was dear. 
He served far and wide, fought on the coasts of the Red 
Sea, wintered in Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, spent some 
years in China, and seems to have visited the Malay 
islands; once he was shipwrecked on the Chinese coast. 
It is clear that he roamed the Orient on all the lines 
of travel and enterprise, of commerce and war, wherever 
the Portuguese ships could sail, and bore throughout 
the name and character of a gentleman-adventurer of 
that world, a daring, enterprising, hopeful, unfortunate, 
and often distressed man. 

Sixteen years of his manhood passed in these toils — 

"In one hand aye the Sword, in one the Pen," 

— along the tropical seas and under the alien skies ; for 
from the first, even before in his youth he planted a lance 
in Africa, he had held to his breast that little manuscript 
book where year by year, on the deck and the gun-breech, 
in his grotto at Macao, in prison, wherever he might be 
and under whatever aspect of fortune, he wrote down 
the growing lines of that poem which is now the chief 
glory of his native land. When he was shipwrecked in 
China, he lost the little store of gold that he had accu- 
mulated in the office which he was recalled from, but he 
held safe this book — 

"In his embrace the song that swam to land 
From sad and piteous shipwreck dripping wet 
'Scaped from the reefs and rocks that fang the 
strand." 



2o6 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Now, after sixteen years, nostalgia, not simple home- 
sickness, but the nostalgia of him who fares forth into 
the world and voyages long in stranger-lands, had fallen 
on him, and was heavy in all his spirit. He had left 
Portugal, indignantly saying that his country should not 
possess his bones; but he had long changed this temper — 

"Tagus yet pealeth with the passion caught 
From the wild cry he flung across the sea"; — 

all his hopes had really rested on the honor of the song 
he had built up for the glory of Portugal, and while every- 
thing else that men name success faded away and escaped 
him, with this poem surely he would find welcome home. 
He stopped at Mozambique with the captain governor, 
and when he wished to continue his voyage, this officer, 
who was his host, consigned him to prison for a debt due 
himself, a small sum. Soon afterwards, however, a ship 
came by, with a dozen of Camoens' old messmates and 
friends, veterans, and they contributed the money for his 
release. So, says the old biographer, "were simultane- 
ously sold the person of Camoens and the honor of Pedro 
Barreto" for £25. With these friends Camoens sailed 
homeward, and arrived safely, but not to find prosperity. 
It was three years before his book was published; and 
he received for reward only a pension of about one hun- 
dred dollars in our money at its present worth, and this 
was not often paid. The entire eight years of his life at 
Lisbon were filled with such poverty and distress as we 
remember of the last dying days of Spenser and Chatter- 
ton. He lived some part of this time in a religious house, 
that is, an almshouse ; at other times his Javanese servant, 
who had stayed with him, begged food for him at night, 
but the faithful servant died before his wretched master. 



CAMOENS 207 

Even among the poets few have been so homeless and 
destitute as Camoens in his lifers end, now going about 
on crutches and suffering the last sad effects of a hard- 
faring life. It was the moment just before his death when 
the power of Portugal was extinguished on the battle- 
field by Philip of Spain: ^'I die," he wrote to a friend, 
"not only in my country, but with it." The time of 
his death is uncertain, but he was about fifty-five years 
old. He died in a hospital. "I saw him die," says an 
old Carmelite brother, "in the hospital of Lisbon, with- 
out a sheet wherewith to cover himself." Such in its 
external events was the life-story of Camoens. 

If one throws upon this harsh narrative the light that 
flows from Camoens' poetry, the lines are softened in 
the retrospect; the hardship and misfortune are seen in 
that atmosphere of melancholy that pervades his strong 
verse and blends with it, as tenderness companions valor 
in the man himself. To see properly the phases of his 
genius, one should glance first at the lyrical works, and 
especially the sonnets, that preceded and accompanied 
the heroic verse of the epic. From his student days at 
the university, unlike Marlowe, he was the heir of a 
developed art, and in all his work is seen the fair back- 
ground of the poetic tradition — in the epic the forms 
of old mythology, and in the lyrics the Italian example 
of Petrarch. To him his lady Caterina was what Pe- 
trarch's Laura had been, an ideal of hopeless and pure 
passion. Her personality is not definitely known, but 
she married and died while still young. Though in his 
sonnets to her Camoens followed the poetic tradition, 
the reality of his devotion cannot be doubted in its in- 
ception; and in its continuance through the years of 
his youth, and especially of his long exile in the Orient, 



2o8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

this ideal passion stood for him, at least, as the sign and 
certainty of his first failure — his failure in love. It 
became, perhaps, after long and hopeless years simply 
the cry of his imagination, but it had its original being 
in the call of the heart. Very sweet and noble, though 
conventional, is his early pleading: — 

"Beautiful eyes, whereof the sunny sphere 
When most with cloudless clarity of light 
The infinite expanse he maketh bright, 
Doubting to be eclipsed, doth stand in fear: 
If I am held in scorn who hold you dear, 
Then, having of all things such perfect sight, 
Consider this thing too, that mortal night 
To cover up your beauty draweth near. 
Gather, O gather with unstaying hand, 
The fruits that must together gathered be. 
Occasion ripe, and Passion's clasp divine. 
And, since by you I live and die, command 
Love, that he yield his tribute unto me, 
Who unto you have freely yielded mine." 

After years of vain castle-building during which he 
seemed his ''own sorrow's architect," and in that wide 
roaming which he describes — 

"Now scattering my music as I pass, 
The world I range, — 

he still kept true to the lover's creed: — 

"All evils Love can wreak behold in me. 
In whom the utmost of his power malign 
He willed unto the world to manifest: 
But I, like him, would have these things to be. 
Lifted by woe to ecstasy divine, 
I would not change for all the world possest." 

When his lady died, he lifted his prayer in his loveliest 
and most famous sonnet — 



CAMOENS 209 

"Soul of my soul, that didst so early wing 
From our poor world thou heldest in disdain, 
Bound be I ever to my mortal pain, 
So thou hast peace before the Eternal King! 
If to the realms where thou dost soar and sing 
Remembrance of aught earthly may attain. 
Forget not the deep love thou did'st so fain 
Discover my fond eyes inhabiting. 
And if my yearning heart unsatisfied, 
And pang on earth incurable have might 
To profit thee and me, pour multiplied 
Thy meek entreaties to the Lord of Light, 
That swiftly He would raise me to thy side, 
As suddenly He rapt thee from my sight." 

In these sonnets and other lyrical poems the poet is 
hardly more personal than in the heroic epic, but his per- 
sonality is more exclusively felt, and the topics are not 
confined to his love. The most lasting impression made 
is of the passing of hope out of his life. Camoens was 
one of those souls who are great in hope; and he often 
bent upon the past reverted eyes, and drew the sum of his 
losses, ending in the refrain — 

"For Death and Disenchantment all was made — 
Woe unto all that hope! to all that trust!" 

The vein of melancholy in the lyrical poems opens the 
tenderness of Camoens, and perhaps the softer note is 
somewhat overcharged in these admirable but rather Ital- 
ianated version of Dr. Garnett's that I have used; life- 
weariness and profound discouragement, indeed, there is 
in them; but they are not the simple outflow of a Pe- 
trarchan lover's complaint, but the sorrows of a much- 
toiling man; for Camoens was both sailor and soldier, 
and as natural to those ways of labor as to the handling 



210 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

of the lute. The voyage, the march, and the battle made 
up the larger part of his life. 

This opens the second trait to be observed in the phases 
of his development, namely, his absorption of the patri- 
otic vitality of his country. It is true that he inherited 
a developed and conventionalized art, and had always 
that fair background of classical figures and Italian at- 
mosphere which were his portion of the Renaissance; 
but the Renaissance was rather like a little mountain 
city where he was born and drank his youth; he did 
not abide there, but came down into the great modern 
world that was then to be — the world of the waste of 
waters and the spreading empires. Portugal played a 
great part in that age which broke the horizon bars and 
passed the western and the eastern limit of the sun alike, 
and made the fleets as free of the ocean as the sea-birds 
of every wandering wave. Camoens was to make this 
the great theme of his song — the ocean fame of Portu- 
gal. But he was inducted into his passion of patriotism 
by natural ways, before the glory of the ocean discoveries 
was fully opened in his mind. Portugal, you remember, 
was the child of battle, born of the conflict of the Chris- 
tian and the Moor; on the stricken field she found her 
crown itself, and became a state, and in maintaining the 
struggle that drove the Crescent back into Africa, and 
in following across the straits to free the seaboard, she 
developed her strength, laid up her most heroic memo- 
ries, and built those navies that were to open and com- 
mand so many seas. 

When Camoens in his youth fought his first campaigns 
in Africa, he was united with his country's cause and 
honor in its great historic current, and it was by nature 
that there flamed up in him that national pride, hating 



CAMOENS 211 

and triumphing over the Moor, which is the historic 
substance of his epic. He had found his theme in battling 
with the Moorish power. The reahzation of this theme, 
the patriotic past of his country, was the second phase 
of his development. Then came, with his long and 
perilous voyage and his years of wanderings through all 
the picturesque coasts of the East, that expansion and 
enrichment of his theme which reduced the original 
Moorish battle to the rank of episode and background, 
while the maritime greatness of Portugal, set forth in 
the story of the voyage of Da Gama round the Cape of 
Good Hope as the main action, became the more promi- 
nent subject. The poem itself yields these three main 
elements corresponding to the division that has been 
made: the background of classical mythology, which 
affords the mechanism of the plot, and is of the Renais- 
sance; the history of Portugal which affords the time 
perspectives and the main episodes; and lastly the for- 
tunes of Da Gama. The poem thus grew with Camoens' 
own growth, and contains his artistic training in the 
school of Renaissance tradition, his youthful African 
marches and raids, and his manhood voyages. He made 
it embrace the whole glory of Portugal, compressed into 
its stanzas all her romance, heroism, and fable from the 
earliest record in antique days to his own hour, spread 
in it the naval dominion of her great contemporary age; 
and he did this, not as a reminiscent scholar in Virgil's 
way or Tasso's way, but as one who had labored in the 
glorious action by sea and land, near the port and far in 
the open, boy and man, with sword and pen. The en- 
thusiasm of a lifetime here gathers and gives out the 
passion of a whole nation and makes a people's glory one 
with the poet's fame. The 'Xusiads" is the principal 



212 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

monument of Portugal, and the chief national bond that 
binds her children in one. 

It is this infusion of personality — and personality 
like Marlowe's of the daring Renaissance type — which 
makes the "Lusiads" so different from all other epics. 
The theme is not presented as an ideal action in remote 
time after the manner of other poets, but seems a real 
event, something that the poet had done and been. It 
is as if Ulysses had written the "Odyssey." Camoens 
was himself, like Ulysses, such a traveler, a romantic 
wanderer, a hard-toiling man, in the heroic exile of 
enterprise on the sea-edges of a larger and unknown 
world. It is this temperament of the wanderer that so 
endears him to all nomad souls. It is this which made 
him attractive to Captain Burton, for example, who 
made the labor of translating his works a part of his task 
for twenty years; and though it is marvelously unread- 
able, it is from his translation that I shall quote; for at 
times, and not seldom, he catches the spirit of Camoens 
as the sail catches the wind. The "Lusiads" is a sea- 
poem. No poem approaches it in maritime quality ex- 
cept the "Odyssey." The note of the whole is struck in 
Da Gama's account of the setting sail of the fleet from 
Lisbon: — 

"We from the well-known port went sorrowing, 
After the manner of far-faring men." 

The fleet made out to sea, and this is the parting 
view: — 

"Slow, ever slower, banisht from our eyne, 
Vanisht our native hills, astern remaining; 
Remained dear Tagus, and the breezy line 
Of Cintran peaks, long, long, our gaze detaining ; 



CAMOENS 213 

Remained eke in that dear country mine 
Our hearts, with pangs of memory ever paining ; 
Till, when all veiled sank in darkling air. 
Naught but the welkin and the wave was there." 

The sense not only of the deep sea, as in this last line, 
but of the undiscovered, is constantly present — not only 
the illiminitable waste of waters, but the peril of them. 
It is a growing peril, vaguely felt at first beside the new 
islands and capes lately discovered, in the strangeness 
of the coasts by which the ships drop southward, in 
the adventures with the unfamiliar tribes at the land- 
falls; but the strangeness becomes peril, slowly and 
surely — that panic fear which is not for a moment of 
alarm but for days and nights of increasing dread — the 
mood which all great explorers have known, from Colum- 
bus to the latest, who have had to master their men with 
the desperate force of a higher courage and hold them 
to the onward course. It is this gigantic fear, rising 
from the endless rolling of the sea and driving of the 
cloudy winds in the pathless ways of the lonely sail — 
it is this fear that Camoens gives body and a name in 
the most daring and perhaps the most celebrated of the 
inventions of his fancy — the apparition of the giant 
phantom, Adamastor, off the Cape of Good Hope. 
Adamastor symbolizes the dangers of the ocean enter- 
prise and the revenge of the elements outraged by the 
human victory over their brute power. 

What Camoens there renders by imagination and alle- 
gory he draws again realistically in the account of the 
storm in the Indian Ocean. The storm in Shakespeare's 
^'Tempest'' is the only sea-storm that compares with it 
for majesty and violence, and at the same time for truth 
to sea-weather. The little picture of the nightwatch on 





214 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

deck with which the scene opens gives perhaps in briefest 
space that unaffected naturalism which distinguishes 
Camoens' descriptions of actuality: — 

"All half-numbed and chill 
Shivered with many a yawn the huddling crew 
Beneath the bulging mainsail, clothed ill 
To bear the nightly breath that keenly blew; 
Their eyes kept open sore against their will 
They rubbed and stretched their torpid limbs anew," — 

and to keep awake they begin to spin yarns; in this 
case the fine chivalric tale of the Twelve of England — 
in the course of which the storm breaks on them with 
tropic suddenness. 

The labor of the life is thus a main element in the 
poem, which is solid with experience and somber with it, 
also. Camoens delighted in his companions, those vas- 
sals of the king, "peerless in their worth," but it is the 
darker side of their lives that holds his imagination and 
memory alike: — 

"Look how they gladly wend by many a way: — 
Self-doomed to sleepless night and foodless day, 
To fire and steel, shaft-shower, and bullet-flight; 
To torrid Tropics, Arctics frore and gray, 
The Pagan's buffet and the Moor's despite ; 
To risks invisible, threatening human life, 
To wreck, sea-monsters and the wave's wild strife." 

The lonely death in a foreign land, always near in 
the prospect, imparts a deep melancholy to the verse, 
that true epic melancholy, which Virgil summed in that 
one of his most immortal lines where the dying soldier 
"remembers sweet Argos." Camoens was a man of 
friendships, of that comradeship which flowers only in 
such hardy soil, and many of his verses lament the un- 



CAMOENS 215 

timely death of the brave heart in its youth. One son- 
net on the death of a comrade in Africa, in the form of 
an epitaph spoken by the victim, best tells the story: — ; 

"Few years and evil to my life were lent, 
All with hard toil and misery replete: 
Light did so swiftly from my eyes retreat. 
That ere five lusters quite were gone, I went. 
Ocean I roamed and isle and continent, 
Seeking some remedy for life unsweet; 
But he whom Fortune will not frankly meet. 
Vainly by venture woos her to his bent. 
First saw I light in Lusitanian land, 
Where Alemquer the blooming nurtured me; 
But, feeble foul contagion to withstand, 
I feed the fish's maw where thou, rude sea, 
Lashest the churlish Abyssinian strand. 
Far from my Portugal's felicity." 

The same mood, in the "Lusiads," fills the stanza which 
he dedicates to the memory of all who fell by the wave 
and along the trail: — 

"At last in tangled brake and unknown ground 
Our true companions lost for aye we leave. 
Who mid such weary ways, such dreary round. 
Such dread adventures, aidance ever gave. 
How easy for man's bones a grave is found! 
Earth's any wrinkle, ocean's any wave, 
Whereso the long home be, abroad, at home. 
For every hero's corse may lend a tomb." 

Camoens is always directly faithful to the daily and 
hourly life, to the physical scene and the human man- 
ners; but his truth to the heroic spirit, the martial 
breath that filled the sails of the great enterprise, and 
also his truth to the sentiment of the wanderer, the 



2i6 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

power whereby he renders the melancholy which falls 
from the dry and sterile Arabian peaks of rose-red rock, 
diffusing that nostalgia of the brave heart, heightening 
all that bravery so, and thereby renews for us, and illu- 
mines, that old type of the "much-enduring" man — all 
this constitutes a truth for which reality seems but a 
faint and shadowy name. It is the truth not merely 
of a voyage, but of man's life on earth — such as it is 
when poetry presents it most nobly, most feelingly, and 
without a veil. To Camoens the fortune of human life 
showed no smiling face; it was not in fortune but in 
character that he found life's value. He was a lover 
of heroic men, those 

"By the doughty arm and sword that chase 
Honor which man may proudly hail his own ; 
In weary vigil, in the steely case, 
'Mid wrathsome winds and bitter billows thrown, 
Suff' ring the frigid rigors in th' embrace 
Of South, and regions lorn, and lere, and lone; 
Swallowing the tainted rations' scanty dole. 
Salted with toil of body, moil of soul." 

The character of Da Gama is very nobly drawn ; he is all 
that such a leader should be; a figure worthy of his place 
in the poem, and of the fame to which he is exalted, akin 
to i^neas before him and to Tasso's Godfrey who was 
born after him. Camoens' morality, his conception of 
the character of "a good king, a great captain, a wise 
councillor, a just judge, a pure priest," as Burton draws 
the catalogue, is always energetic and lofty. Of all his 
personal qualities he is most proud of his own independ- 
ence in judgment, his honesty of speech, his perfect and 
entire fearlessness. He returns repeatedly to this claim 
of truth-telling, which he thought was his duty as a part 



CAMOENS 217 

of his fidelity to the Muses; and when he invokes their 
aid, he makes this his main plea: — 

"Aid me you only: — long indeed sware I 
No grace to grant where good doth not prevail, 
And none to flatter, whatso their degrees 
On pain of losing all my power to please." 

In telling the story of Portugal, past and present, he 
had much occasion to use this high ideal; not even in 
those days did he hesitate to denounce and inveigh within 
the pale of the Church itself. MoraHty, in the high 
sense of character, pervades the poem; virtue, in the 
ancient and manly meaning of the word — the old epic 
"arms and the man" — is its substance, and charm is 
diffused over it as in the "^Eneid." This charm partly 
arises from that oriental coloring — the lux ex Oriente 
— natural to the scene, in the detail of which, Burton 
says, Camoens rarely trips, being more accurate than 
most modern authors, and that experienced traveler 
wonders at the quality of the brain that amassed so much 
information from sources so few and so imperfect. The 
charm, however, lies also in the contrast between the 
realism of the matter and the fantastic power of Cam- 
oens' imagination, which is one of his most powerful and 
fascinating traits and peculiarly a feature of his orig- 
inality. The Adamastor episode serves as an example; 
but a nobler one is the ideal figuring of the rivers Indus 
and Ganges, who appear like Neptunian forms in the 
dream of the old king which was one of the motives 
of the voyage. The variation by which the scenes of 
pictured history — a tradition of the epic and seen by 
^neas, you remember, at Carthage — are here found 
spread on the banners of the festally decorated Portu- 



2i8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

guese ships is a happy play of the poet's fancy. The 
isle of Venus, that receives the homeward-bound fleet, 
is perhaps the most surprising, as it is certainly the love- 
liest, of these imaginative fantasies. But it is not by 
any piecemeal criticism and naming of passages that 
the quality of this epic can be conveyed. 

Yet one must add still another of its larger elements, 
namely, its spaciousness. I mean the map of the world, 
like that map in Marlowe's ^'Tamburlaine," that it un- 
folds. Camoens describes the European quarter early 
in the poem, beginning from Russia and sweeping south- 
ward and west, leaving England entirely out as if it 
were Iceland of to-day, and finding, of course, in the little 
state of Portugal the climax and summit of the world. 
It is a perspective to which our thoughts are unused, 
but in its day was not an untrue one ; and for us to have 
it in mind — to emigrate into it, as it were — is a pre- 
requisite to the appreciation of the ^Xusiads," for such 
was Camoens' world. He also describes the voyaging 
of the fleet with great detail. But it is in the last book 
of the poem that the face of the new earth is shown, 
magically in the mystic globe of the planetary sphere, to 
Da Gama by the Siren: that new earth, fresh as it then 
arose from the uncovered waters — the Asian seas and con- 
tinent and islands, the African coasts and uplands, and 
the unknown west far as through Magellan's Straits; it 
is a wide reach, a finer vision than Milton gave from the 
specular mount, and with it as in its own horizons the 
epic ends. 

The "Lusiads" is the only truly modern epic, but one 
seems to breathe in it the early air of the "Odyssey" 
and "Iliad" more than in any intervening poem; like the 
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey," it has no love element in 



CAMOENS 219 



its plot, but the old heroic life — man^s life of the oar- 
blade and the battle-field — rules the scene. The sense 
of primitive life, however, is still deeper-seated, in its 
neighborhood to nature, where the sky is the tent of the 
bivouac and the roof of the deck-watch, and man is a 
solitary figure in the landscape, and life a hand-to-hand 
affair. Into that far alien field of earth and waters 
the pride of Portugal is carried, as it were, on the ban- 
ners of a little squadron conquering a mighty world 
It was fitting in the Peninsular war that the regiments 
of Portugal went into battle with lines of Camoens in- 
scribed upon their flags. Yet it is a narrow view that 
would see in the ^Xusiads" only the self-glorification of 
a little state. It has a larger significance. The blend- 
ing of the East and West at a great dawn of history is 
here rendered in a noble form of human greatness, cast 
in the lives of a few brave men equal to great tasks. 

Such are a few of the traits of this epic. But what a 
fiery soul must that have been which could carry such 
a passion of poetry through the years of exile and ever 
cherish it as a life above life itself! The deep melan- 
choly of Camoens, as it gathered in later years, is plain- 
his failure in love — the hunger of the heart that was 
never to be appeased with any earthly touch of the ideal 
— was but the sign of the famine that fell upon him in 
all the ways of success. He had no talent for success 
He was filled with poet's blood, as the pure grape with 
wme. He was wild and free, amorous, framed for en- 
joyment. Southern-hearted, a boon comrade, a tender 
friend; between the prison and the camp and the ship's 
deck he had a soldier's gaiety, was fond of fine apparel 
and of golden suppers — the adventurer's changeful for- 
tune; but failure was all he found in the East, and the 



2 20 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

profound discouragement of his lot invaded his heart 
at last. He reviewed his life in one of his last sonnets. 

"In lowly cell, bereaved of liberty, 
Error's meet recompense, long time I spent; 
Then o'er the world disconsolate I went, 
Bearing the broken chain that left me free; 
My life I gave unto this memory; 
No lesser sacrifice would Love content; 
And poverty I bore and banishment; 
So it was ordered, so it had to be. 
Content with little, though I knew indeed 
Content unworthy, yet, aloof from strife, 
I loved to mark Man's various employ. 
But my disastrous star, whom now I read, 
Blindness of death, and doubtfulness of life, 
Have made me tremble when I see a joy." 

The passing of hope out of his life was the history of 
his soul. He came home only to make disaster sure, as 
the event proved. Sick, old with wounds, the almshouse 
gave him to the hospital, and the hospital to the grave, 
as a corpse is cast from wave to wave till it sinks into a 
nameless tomb. It seems — it is — pitiful. 

"Woe unto all that hope! to all that trust!" 

It is the epitaph of most of the poets. Yet it is from 
the consuming flame of such a passion and power of life 
as burnt in this much-enduring soul that poetic genius 
gives out its immortal star. 



J 



IV 

BYRON 

It is an error to think of Byron as an English poet; 
he was expatriated not only in his person but in his 
genius; and this partly accounts for the fact that his 
reputation so soon became, and still remains, Continental. 
He was not a poet of what was always, for him, the dis- 
mal island of his birth. He was rather a poet of the 
Mediterranean world. There he found the main mate- 
rial of his works — the motive, the stage, the incidents, 
and the inspiration — the picturesque and romantic 
scene of his imagination, ranging from the Straits of 
Gibraltar to the Golden Horn. He stamped his mem- 
ory there — still felt — from Calpe to Stamboul. Portu- 
gal and Spain, Albania and Greece were his earliest 
topics in verse after his boyish preluding was done; 
Italy was the main theme of his most majestic manhood 
poetry; and by a nearer and internal tie the Italian 
literary tradition entered into his genius and character- 
ized his style. England need not have troubled to refuse 
him so often and so long a niche in the Abbey; for 
wherever his bones may lie or tablets of grateful honor 
he erected, Greece is the true shrine of his memory, and 
will always be so. In all things that pertain to the im- 
mortal part of him, he thus belongs to the Mediterranean; 
and it is only in the perspective of those broken coasts, 
in the purple of those lonely islands, in the high atmos- 

221 



222 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

phere of those snow-clad and thronging peaks that his 
genius is seen as in its home. 

He was but a youth and in the first flush of his poetic 
blood, when the Mediterranean revelation came to him, 
on his first voyage. He entered the south by Lisbon. 
The moment was a true awakening; and so natural that 
he was not aware the poet was born in him ; and later he 
was still clinging to his adolescent and apprentice work 
— such as the ^'Hints from Horace" — for the hope of 
reputation, when by the publication of these first Medi- 
terranean moods, he "awoke and found himself famous." 
But his fame was not more sudden than the awakening 
had been. He responded at once to that disclosure of 
the Mediterranean beauty, which is a romantic marvel 
to all Northern eyes ; 

"Ah me, — what hand can pencil guide or pen 
To follow half on which the eye dilates?" 

and one feels his new throb of life in the mere ampli- 
tude of description that overflows even from the earliest 
stanzas: — 

"The horrid crags by toppling convent crowned; 
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep; 
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrowned; 
The sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep; 
The tender azure of the unruffled deep, 
The orange fruits that gild the greenest bough, 
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, 
The vine on high, the willow branch below, 
Mixt in one mighty scene." 

Byron had the poet's temperament, full and strong — 
the peril in his blood, the wildness of impulse, the law- 
less will, the passion of life. He was fresh from his first 
angers with life, and had gone out from England seeking 



BYRON 223 

an escape — some air of freer breath, some horizon to 
wander in. It was now that the love of the ocean was 
confirmed in him; for in his experience it was a love of 
Mediterranean waves. It was from them, as he sailed 
onward, that the Corsairs' song was caught: — 

''O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, 
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free, 
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam. 
Survey our empire, and behold our home!" 

It was a great adventure for this youth of twenty years 
-— such a voyage into the Levant. It was a free life — 
such freedom as he had never known — and it was ro- 
mantic in its scene and human incident, its mingling with 
more primitive men of strange aspect and rough hardi- 
hood, its combined naturalness and foreignness. He 
never forgot its pictures; and he drew one for all in that 
passage of "The Dream" which describes in brief these 
wanderings: — 

"In the wilds 
Of fiery climes he made himself a home. 
And his soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt 
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not 
Himself like what he had been; on the sea 
And on the shore he was a wanderer; 
There was a mass of many images 
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was 
A part of all; and in the last he lay 
Reposing from the noontide sultriness, 
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade 
Of ruined walls that had survived the names 
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side 
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds 
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man 
Clad in a flowing garb did watch the while 
While many of his tribe slumbered around; 



224 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

And they were canopied by the blue sky, 
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful. 
That God alone was to be seen in heaven." 

This admirably composed oriental scene may stand 
for the circumstance and atmosphere of this voyage as 
Byron himself remembered it, but it needs to be sup- 
plemented by the more stirring scenes, such as his re- 
ception by the Suliotes when the weather forced him and 
his crew to land on that doubtful coast: — 

"Vain fear! The Suliotes stretched the welcome hand, 
Led them o'er rocks, and past the dangerous swamp. 
And piled the hearth, and wrung their garments damp, 
And 'filled the bowl, and trimmed the cheerful lamp, 
And spread their fare — though homely, all they had." 

Through such contact with nature, with the pictur- 
esque and primitive, with wild and savage or broad and 
solitary scenes, Byron's imagination first took on its ro- 
mantic color; and the free life he led in the open, on the 
sea and in camp, loosed in him that spirit of adventure 
which in his verse took the cast of desperate love and 
pirate warfare — the passion and brigandage of the Levan- 
tine East. They were almost natural elements in that 
environment; and in idealizing them the ardors of his own 
young temperament found an imaginative form. Byron 
never again lived so fully and keenly, either imaginatively 
or in the merely physical sense, as in this early year of his 
Mediterranean roving. He was not a natural wanderer, a 
born traveler, like Camoens. He never heard the call of 
the wilderness nor obeyed the Wander-lust. This voyage 
was only such a one as any young Englishmen might take 
for pleasure, for sport. Nevertheless, to him, being a poet, 
it constituted his awakening, and stirred and freed him, 



BYRON 225 

and gave his genius wing. It remained his deepest poetic 
experience and the happiest memory of his dying past, 
with its ''rosy floods of twilight's sky"; its latest recol- 
lections, after many years, gave, in "Don Juan," the 
loveliest scenes of all his verse; and he was conscious 
of the debt: — 

"Ave Maria! blessed be the hour! 
The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft 
Have felt that moment in its fullest power 
Sink o'er the earth, so beautiful and soft. 
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, 
Or the faint, dying day-hymn stole aloft. 
And not a breath crept through the rosy air. 
And yet the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer." 

Byron in later years himself once wrote to Moore in 
a moment of discouragement that his poetical feelings 
began and ended with Eastern countries, and that having 
exhausted the subject, he could make nothing of any 
other. Certain it is that this year of adventurous travel 
unlocked the sources of his poetic power. 

The sudden burst of his genius under these favoring 
circumstances is, as you know, one of the wonders of 
literary fame. He had made three very simple prime dis- 
coveries. The first was of the romance of the Orient; 
and his rendering of it in his tales is still its chief ex- 
ample in our literature. Moore, who cultivated the 
same field, was in this as in other things only Byron's 
satellite; and both he and Southey and the others who 
added the Arabian or Persian glamour to their works were 
mainly indebted to dictionaries, commentators, and 
travelers, whereas B5n'on took it from its native soil. 
However melodrama may enter into his tales, it would 
be an error not to recognize their realism, not only in 



226 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

their magnificent nature-coloring, but also in their man- 
ners, the accoutrement of their scenes, the play of their 
passions — and especially in their truth to the sentiment 
of the land — 

"The land where the cypress and myrtle 
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime." 

Byron's genius, in a certain sense, was low-flying; he 
never liked to be far from matter of fact; and in that 
"bodiless creation" that the more ethereal, spiritualizing 
poets delight in, he was without faculty. He was little 
gifted with the power of invention, and beneath his verse 
is often found the substratum of the prose of others. Even 
in these tales there is paraphrasing of Mrs. Radcliffe's 
novel, "The Bravo," for example; just as in his drama 
"Werner" there is another English novel, and in "The 
Island" and in the shipwreck of "Don Juan" there are 
versions of old voyages. Byron required that the scene 
should be given to him, a basis of matter of fact — 
realism. It was his good fortune that, in assimilating 
the Orient, realism was given to him in a romantic form 
and on that superb landscape background, of which the 
description of the sunset over the Morea, seen -from 
Acrocorinth, is perhaps the most familiar example. This 
coloring belongs to the characters as well, who are 
charged with passion and bravery; and the whole is in 
keeping with that tradition of violent adventure and 
sudden turns of fortune, which is the historic legend of 
the Mediterranean in the Moslem centuries. The tales, 
in fact, are nearer to the temper of Southern literature, 
long familiar with the Saracen and the Turk, than to 
our own. Their realism cannot but seem exotic in Eng- 
lish, but to the traveler they recall the country of their 



BYRON 227 

origin with the vividness of memory. For Byron's fame 
this discovery of the Levant was not unlike what the dis- 
covery of the Highlands had been for Scott — a new 
world where fact itself was romance. 

The second discovery of Byron was the sentiment of 
history in the landscape. It began in his classical devo- 
tion. He had been bred in school and college on Greek, 
and had that enthusiasm for the ancient past that was 
one of the great and fruitful traits of the old education. 
He had translated from many a Greek poet with school- 
boy fervor. This voyage vivified his boyhood studies. 
Nothing is more genuine in his life than the emotion 
with which the actual presence of the sacred places of 
the old Greek land filled him. 

"Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey, 
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer's eye, 
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay, 
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky. 
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty! . . . 

Oft have I dreamed of Thee! whose glorious name 
Who knows not, knows not man's divinest lore: 
And now I view thee, 'tis, alas, with shame 
That I in feeblest accents must adore. 
When I recount thy worshipers of yore 
I tremble, and can only bend the knee; 
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar, 
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy 
In silent joy to think at last I look on Thee!" 

It was on the next day after composing these stanzas that 
he saw on Parnassus the flight of twelve eagles that he 
took as a happy omen of his poetic fame. The mood 
of these lines, the mere fact of this incident, testify to 
the sincerity of his feeling. It warmed his description 



228 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

of Greece, and gave that heroic blast to the lines with 
which again and again he strives to rouse the sleeping 
land. It was a feeling, moreover, destined to a rich 
development, and at last made him the characteristic 
type of the brooder over the buried past — the poet of 
the desolation of human greatness. Here, again, the 
solid base of history, the natural cling of his mind to 
realism, to matter of fact, is noticeable. Under this 
mood of history poetry becomes meditative, in a deep 
sense, and broods upon human fate in its final issues; 
there grows up that feeling which Tennyson called "the 
passion of the past," and it interprets itself and finds 
expression as an elegy of the nations. Byron became 
the great poet of this mood; it was born of his contact 
with the Mediterranean shores, and it took its touch 
of nobility especially from the classic stir of his emo- 
tions in Greece. 

The third discovery in this year of travel was his 
practical enthusiasm for political liberty; or, if it be 
hardly just to ascribe to one group of circumstances the 
revolutionary force that played so great a part in his 
fame and was so deeply rooted in his nature, yet it was 
the actual sight of the servitude of Greece that pre- 
cipitated and condensed and gave practical direction to 
his ardor. Every line of his enthusiasm for the Greece 
of old goes coupled with a rousing cry to free the 
land; and great lines they are in which he strikes this 
tocsin of liberty, none more famous: — 

"Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not 
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow!" 

Indignation with the present sloth and ignominy is in 
constant struggle with his memory of the past and 



BYRON 229 

his feeling of virtue in the soil and of the beauty of 
the scene: — 

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild; 
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, 
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled, 
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields; 
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, 
The free-born wanderer of thy mountain-air; 
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds. 
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare; 
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair. 

"Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground; 
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould, 
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, 
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told, 
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold 
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon; 
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold 
Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: 
Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon.'* 

The very name of the old battle-field is a reproach. 
It is in these stanzas, and others like them, that there 
is the prophecy of Missolonghi. 

These three elements of the verse, the romance of 
the Orient, the sentiment of the past in the place of its 
decay, the call to arms against the Turk, are Mediter- 
ranean moods. Every traveler still recognizes them as 
dominant in his own experience — the picturesqueness, 
the desolation of old time, the hope. The sense of deso- 
lation is the most universal and profound, and in five 
lines Byron gave it expression that is true not of one 
place but on the thousands of miles of those lonely and 
half -savage coasts: 



230 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

"Look on this spot — a nation's sepulchre! 
Abode of gods whose shrines no longer burn. 
Even gods must yield — religions take their turn; 
'Twas Jove's; 'tis Mahomet's; and other creeds 
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn 
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds." 

Every traveler knows the mood, and there at least is 
apt to find it just. Outside of the circle of these three 
earlier motives, romance, meditation on the past, en- 
franchisement, the nobler genius of Byron, even in after 
years, hardly moved; nor did it rise to its height in 
other than Mediterranean air, except on the field of 
Waterloo and in the mountains of Switzerland. 

In his works he gave the first motive, romance, its 
most memorable expression in the loves of Juan and 
Haidee in scenes of unrivalled beauty — the highest 
reach of the romance of passion in English verse; the 
second motive, meditation, he developed most impres- 
sively and eloquently in the last book of ^'Childe Harold," 
making Italy his theme, in an elegy of genius and em- 
pire that is nowhere equalled; the third, freedom, found 
its climax not in poetry but in his death for Greece. 

There is yet another element that sprang and strength- 
ened in this year of travel, and is inextricably blended 
with the other three — his initiation into the love of 
nature. Byron was not, as I have already said, a true 
rover; he was not only not a Camoens — he was not even 
a Burton or a Borrow. He never again repeated this 
excursion, but was content to live within the pale of 
civilization. He was aristocratically bred, and neces- 
sarily a social person; in the fine stanzas on solitude, you 
remember, he found true solitude, not in nature but in 
crowds, that is, in the sense of isolation, and this marks 



BYRON 231 

him as essentially a social person; but once in his life 
he had approached the mood of the rover, and he de- 
scribes the precise moment when he — 

"felt himself at length alone, 
And bade to Christian tongues a long adieu; 
Now he adventured on a shore unknown, 
Which all admire, but many dread to view ; 
His breast was armed 'gainst fate, his wants were few; 
Peril he sought not, but ne'er shrank to meet; 
The scene was savage, but the scene was new; 
This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet, 
Beat back keen winter's blast and welcomed summer's heat." 

It is the picture of a young man with a horse, the mood 
of Kinglake, for example, in "Eothen." But in this 
adventure he first touched hands with nature, and found 
by experience the bracing and reposing power that nature 
exercises on the social and aristocratic man bred in cities 
— he found the relief which nature affords as a foil to 
life. He escaped from the conventional and entangling 
sphere of society, and reached unbounded freedom in 
the open. The scene appealed to him also as a poet; 
the extraordinary beauty of it, the majestic mountain 
ranges round the long purple gulfs, the mere clarity of 
the heavens were a revelation to his senses, and edu- 
cated them, and through them entered into his spirit. 
There was also an idiosyncrasy in his temperament, 
something grandiose in the man's soul which the greater 
scenes of nature developed and defined more consciously 
and gave a run of feeling; such scenes roused the physi- 
cal electricity of his body, and made him sympathetic 
with the Alpine storm, the glacier peak, and the ocean 
gale. This deep power of nature so to stir him, and to 
exhaust itself in mere feeling, first fell on him with full 



232 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

seizure in the solitudes of the Greek coasts. It grew 
with his growth, but it was then dissociated from this 
early adventure and experience of the wild and the 
foreign. It became a power of pure sentiment. "To 
me," he says, "high mountains are a feeling." It was a 
more physical feeling than is found in his contempora- 
ries; he did not idealize and transform and mythologize 
nature, like Shelley, or become pantheistic or religious 
in his thought of it or awe of it, like Wordsworth; among 
nature-poets — and he is one of the greatest of nature- 
poets — he remains in the dimly conscious and uninter- 
preted mood of men who in the presence of nature only 
see and feel. It was true of him in this early time, — 

"Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; 
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home; 
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends, 
He had the passion and the power to roam; 
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam. 
Were unto him companionship ; they spake 
A mutual language." 

But after this first youthful year "the passion and the 
power to roam" was a figment of his ideal self, though 
he retained the secret of that "mutual language," and 
wherever he found himself in his later little journeys 
from Geneva to Venice, from Ravenna to Pisa, he used 
this key. 

It is apparent from what has been already brought 
forward that Byron unfolded his genius characteristic- 
ally through phases of sentiment, romantically colored, 
of which the various elements show themselves clearly 
in the first-fruits of his Mediterranean experience — 
the fourfold sentiment for the Levant, for the elegy of 



BYRON 233 

history, for the hopes of the Greeks, for the more majes- 
tic phenomena and the elemental force of nature. As 
he matured, he developed another sentiment, which was 
destined to swallow up all these, and, as it were, to fatten 
upon them, and to become the memory of him that most 
deeply stamps his personality in the minds of men. I 
can only call it the sentiment of self. He was an egotist, 
as most of the poets have been; egotism is the secret 
of their strength as it is of the strength of all masters of 
the world, except, indeed, the few spiritually minded who 
dare to throw their lives away. He built up, as years 
went on, an ideal self; the analysis of its formation would 
be an interesting psychological study, for it was framed 
from many sources. It is but slightly to be discerned 
in the early cantos of "Childe Harold." It hardly be- 
came fixed in his own mind until after the troubles which 
led to his second and final flight from England into that 
self-exile which lasted till his death. He was one of 
those men who have something theatrical in their nature; 
he loved the center of the stage; he liked effect. The 
circumstances of his life made it easy for him to hold 
attention; and also to adopt into his character an ele- 
ment of mystery, of which he knew the stage value; 
and he favored by his air and conduct the public disposi- 
tion to create in the background of his career something 
melodramatic; he let it be believed that in his own Medi- 
terranean experience there had been the color of "The 
Corsair'' and of "Lara," and that in the type of his heroes 
there was something of himself in masquerade. It is 
in the third canto of "Childe Harold" that he unmasked 
frankly to the public the ideal self as it had come to 
be at the moment of his departure from England — 
the ideal of the blighted life: — 



234 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

"The very kno wedge that he lived in vain, 
That all was over on this side the tomb." 

This is the well-known refrain that through a hundred 
variations makes "Childe Harold" not only an elegy of 
nations but a personal lament of the individual life. It 
does not appear to me that the burden of "Childe Harold" 
is disillusion; it is, on the contrary, disappointment; 

"We wither from our youth, we gasp away: 
Sick — sick — unfound the boon, unslaked the 
thirst — " 

in lines like these the mood is of the futility of life, 
which is as strongly felt in a thwarted ambition as in a 
vanished ideal. Byron's melancholy is not that of the 
betrayed idealist, it seems to me, but rather of the 
thwarted realist; life had denied to him his will. 

Power has always been the quality most immediately 
recognized in Byron — "the greatest force that has ap- 
peared in our literature," says Arnold, you remember, 
"since Shakespeare"; and every reader feels "the fiery 
fount" in him, that Dionysaic daemonic force, which is 
the core of poetic energy. He had the unquenchable 
thirst for life that belongs to the poets; desires and ambi- 
tions filled him; but in the first maturity of manhood, just 
before he was thirty, there fell on him the certainty that 
he was balked, that his passion and power of life was an 
irony of fate, and for him only the curse of being. It 
is not necessary to inquire into the causes of this; the 
fact was so; and against this fact he revolted with a reac- 
tion of tremendous energy. It so happened that the 
country of his birth, England, served her poet mainly as 
a foil that brought out the most violent aspects of this 
revolt. England, in his mind, was the incarnation of 



BYRON 235 

that which had defrauded him. In turn he struck back. 
In his religious dramas he attacked orthodoxy, and in 
^'Don Juan" he attacked morality, as the English under- 
stood those terms; he shocked England, and still shocks 
her, by the blasphemy and licentiousness, as it is there 
described, of his verse. It was his literary revenge on 
his country. 

He still strove for the poetic laurel; he had literary 
ambition to a strong degree, and his historical dramas 
are rooted in this ambition, the fruits of it, and are little 
successful, for the soil of mere ambition is not deep 
enough for poetry. His productiveneess was great and 
rapid; he showed his energy in this trait, and created, as 
it were, by main force a drama in a month, a poem in a 
day. In nearly all the same strain is constant, and the 
despair or contempt of life is the motive that yields alike 
the most sincere and the most cynical verse, and makes 
the ground tone of the whole. It is, however, impos- 
sible not to feel that Byron's suffering was real, that 
in him something noble was frustrated, and that the ideal 
self, on which he concentrated all his power of senti- 
ment with an extraordinary faculty of self-pity and of 
self-exaltation, had genuine elements. In the last canto 
of "Childe Harold" he blends his own melancholy — 
that of the individual life — with the melancholy of the 
fate of human grandeur in a flow of noble eloquence and 
personal passion, gathering breadth and majesty under 
the shadow of Rome, until he pours it like a mighty river 
into the sea in that last magnificent apostrophe on the 
shores of the Mediterranean. "Childe Harold," which 
gave forth the first fountains of his genius, taken in its 
whole course, is its life-stream ; it is his most noble work, 
and contains all his personal ascendency in the figure of 



236 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Harold, and the most powerful elements of his genius 
in its brooding over the life of man and of mankind — 
the fate of passion in life and of glory in time. Its only 
rival in his fame is ^'Manfred," where he gave dramatic 
form to this same ideal self, and condensed its story in 
a brief and tragic play. This form is more somber and 
composed, and seems more personal, more actual in its 
ideal self-portraiture; but this is due to its simpler defi- 
nition and intense concentration. What ^'Childe Har- 
old" is diffusely and elegiacally, "Manfred" is intensely 
and dramatically — the ideal summary of Byron. 

It was this ideal summary that in the next age became 
Byronism, and filled the European youth with its moods; 
nor should there be anything strange in this; for Byron- 
ism, despite all seeming, is the mood of strength. It 
contains the two halves of youthful life at the full — its 
intense ardors and its profound discouragements. The 
melancholy of Byron is the shadow cast by his power; 
he lamented life because he loved it so much. It is 
true that for men of English blood, what seems melo- 
dramatic and sentimental and the weakness of personal 
complaint interferes with the appreciation of his verse; 
but, as I said at the beginning, Byron is not character- 
istically an English poet, but a poet of the Southern 
lands, of the Mediterranean, where he found his inspira- 
tion and his themes, and in whose neighborhood he passed 
his life during the composition of his works; and to 
men of Romance blood, and also to the German and 
the Slav, melodrama and sentiment and the psychology 
of passion are quite a different thing from what they are 
in the British climate and the Anglo-Saxon temperament. 
The surprise and novelty of these things to Englishmen 
was indeed one of the causes of their immediate success 



BYRON 237 

in London when they were still fresh. Byron's render- 
ing of the history and the scenes of passion is the sign 
royal of his poetic genius. He was, in this as in all 
other ways, a realist, and he presented the theme with a 
vividness of emotion, a rush of eloquence, and a dramatic 
tic sense of incident and of catastrophe, that make them 
still the best tales in poetry in our literature, as they 
originally drove Scott, his only rival in the game, out of 
the field. It was natural that with the maturing of years, 
and amid his own private unhappiness, he should show 
the darker side of the history of passion; and no poet 
has so painted its pains and its despairs, as in the Rous- 
seau stanzas and many others; it is natural, too, that 
such an expression, so violent, so warm, so personal, 
so self-revealing, should be more sympathetically re- 
ceived by the nations of Southern temperament, who are 
to the manner born, and in whose lives passion plays like 
blood, and to whose own experience these lines give form 
and meaning. Passion, the poet's gift, was Byron's en- 
dowment and experience both, and in his latest work he 
still drew its scenes with truth and charm beyond all 
others, with delight in them, even when the sequel was 
cynicism. It is by the variety and the fire of his ren- 
derings of real scenes of passion, and by the psycho- 
logical analysis of it as an element in the wretchedness 
and futility of life, that he entered most intimately into 
the hearts of all those youths whom he so stirred upon 
the Continent. It was to them a part of his strength. 
It was as a type of strength and not of weakness that 
they saw him. He was to them a Promethean figure. 
Titanic in energy, suffering the woes of life, and warring 
on the gods of the old regime, the incarnation of splendid 
and passionate revolt against life itself. His poetry had 



238 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

with them the double fortune that it had in himself; it 
blended with their private lives on the pathetic side and 
with their public hopes in their revolutionary energy. 
For, if he was the victim of passion, he was also the 
apostle of liberty; no voice rang like his through Europe 
in the cause of freedom, and in his death he was its 
martyr. 

If there is one thing that is borne in on the sympathetic 
reader of his life, it is that the man lacked a career — 
some channel for the passion and power of life in him to 
pour through, some cause to serve, some deed to do. 
In personality he reminds one of that Renaissance t3TDe, 
masterful, not subject to any law, reckless; and, in his 
later years, he seems near to the decadence, like an 
Italian nobleman of the degeneracy, disoccupied with 
life and more selfishly cynical with each revolving year. 
It was from this state that he roused himself to make 
that last effort in the cause of Greece which restored to 
him the robe of honor that was slipping from his shoul- 
ders. It was from one point of view a kind of suicide 
of genius — the act of a man who finds nothing left but 
to die with honor. In seeking it, nevertheless, he recalls 
to us the generous qualities that were in his youth, of 
which the type is the Boy in the antique oratory. There 
was a spirit of nobility in the man's soul in early years, 
as his school friendships show; and though dimmed, it 
was never lost. He was good metal. He had power; he 
had passion; and the charter of greatness was his. He 
had come to wreck, in his own eyes; and to ours he seems 
like a noble vessel chafing to pieces on the sluggish reef 
of time. He would end it. He remembered his youth — 
when he had sat on Sunium's marble steep and dreamed 
that Greece might yet be free. He went back to those 



BYRON 239 

Adriatic shores, to the Leucadian seas, where he had 
coasted in the dawn of his fame, to the height of snowy 
Parnassus over the long purple gulf that had so stirred 
him, and there in its shadow, in his last stanza, he said 
adieu to life: — 

"Seek out — less often sought than found — 
A soldier's grave, for thee the best; 
Then look around, and choose thy ground, 
And take thy rest." 



V 

GRAY 

I HAVE thought it appropriate to select one example 
of the poetic temperament, not from the ^'bards sub- 
hme," but from those more quiet sons of the Muse whom 
we call minor poets; for, though their works be in low 
relief, yet, if the theory is sound, they should show in 
their degree the traits of the grand style, as we find 
the same supreme Greek art even on broken vases and 
utensils of daily life. Certainly no one would dream 
of describing Gray as "mad" ; the word "passion" is 
grotesquely inapplicable to him; and even such a phrase 
as "the power of life" seems dubiously to be used of his 
lethargic nature. He was a mild and gentle scholar, 
who lived in the lazy air of a university, slow in all 
his physique, intellectually self-indulgent, procrastinat- 
ing, an invalid with invalid habits of conduct, a dilettante, 
a letter-writer. His entire routine of life afflicts us with 
a sense of dulness and heaviness, an English atmosphere 
of dampness and ennui, which inclines us at once to 
commiseration. He wrote very little — so marvelously 
little that he is, in literary history, the typical instance 
of unproductiveness, of sterility. The Dionysiac fire 
was very somnolent, to say the least, in his case. Vesu- 
vius, however, is not always in violent eruption, and 
those who look on it for the most part see the mighty 
mountain with only a thin wisp of smoke lazily drifting 

241 



242 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

upon the pale, high air; sometimes there is not even 
that. 

In comparison with such poets as we have considered, 
Gray's verse is such a wisp of smoke. Yet it is fair to 
remember — what is of tenest forgotten — that great 
Hterature is not a constant product of this planet, that 
many nations have none of it to speak of, and that in 
favored nations it is the rarest of all their products. 
On the whole, poetic energy, if it has the violence and 
splendor of volcanic fire, has also its general repose- 
fulness. In the intervals of activity men are content 
with the phenomena which show the continued, though 
torpid, existence of the great life-principle; and the 
wisp of smoke is, after all, curling placidly up from the 
old forges within. It behooves us, especially, to be 
modest, for our magnificent America has never yet pro- 
duced a poet even of the rank of Gray. Moreover, there 
is a singular circumstance in Gray's case: slight as his 
product was, it has had an immense fame and vogue 
among men. His work resembles one of those single 
anon3nnous poems of the world which have achieved 
fame all by themselves, unaided and alone. Little poetry 
has been so widely read, so familiarized in households, 
as the ^'Elegy." It has also been highly appreciated. 
No poem has had a finer compliment paid it than was 
contained in the old story of Wolfe's reciting it to his 
officers in the darkness of the river as he drifted down to 
his heroic death, and declaring that to write it was more 
glorious than a victory. The ^'Elegy," it is true, is 
somewhat exceptional; but the best of Gray's work has 
had equal immortality, and still goes wherever the Eng- 
lish language makes its way. No one reads Marlowe 
now except students in libraries and poets by profession; 



GRAY 243 

and the voice of Byron grows rare and distant — his 
vogue evaporates; but Gray's verse still has the shining 
of the adamant of time upon its lines, and seems as 
untouched with two centuries as Mimnermus and Theog- 
nis with twenty. Gray is among the poets who die only 
with the language that they breathed. 

Gray did not greatly strive for fame. Perhaps there 
was some obstruction in his nature or his circumstances; 
perhaps he did not greatly care. There was, at least, 
no struggle in him, no restless necessity for expression, 
no stress of thought or of feeling. He was, as a mortal, 
very ordinary; and as a man of culture, very humane. 
He led the stillest of bachelor lives in college chambers. 
If he had deliberately excluded emotion from his life, 
he could hardly have better succeeded. Of course he 
was often bored, and often lazy — that is, not unem- 
ployed, but with a scholar's laziness. He took but little 
interest in contemporary politics or war, and found 
rather amusement than any cause for excitement in the 
spectacle of what men do. The passage in which he 
describes Pitt's speech, on proposing a monument for 
Wolfe, is typical and a melancholy comment on the 
admiration of Wolfe for the writer. ^Titt's second 
speech," he says, ^^was a studied and puerile declamation 
on funeral honors. In the course of it he wiped his 
eyes with one handkerchief, and Beckford, who seconded 
him, cried, too, and wiped with two handkerchiefs at 
once, which was very moving." That is typical of the 
way in which he looked on human affairs. They were 
no great matter — Gray was a gentleman. He moved 
freely in the world of high life, and liked to talk of men 
of rank over the sweet wine he drank after his mutton. 
The passions of nations, the swing of ideas, the fortunes 



244 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

of battle, were no more to him than club topics would 
be to-day, news and conversation, but not exciting. He 
read Rousseau, he says, but "heavily, heavily" ; that is, 
he was bored. He had his well-bred circle of friends, 
very polite, and his well-bred private tastes, very culti- 
vated; but he was unmoved, habitually otiose, lethargic, 
oppressed with the dulness of things very often, yet not, 
I think, unhappy; indeed, a certain intellectual gaiety, 
even in describing his own dulness, is a part of the charm 
of his private correspondence. There was much non- 
chalant good breeding in him, especially as he grew up 
and came into the routine of manhood; he was a man 
of the world, not in the sense of being merely a man 
of society, but in the sense of being disengaged, dis- 
interested, the impartial spectator with a light touch, 
a just judgment, and a tone of elegance. 

In his youth he appears more amiable, though there 
was in him then all the promise of the type he became. 
He made, you remember, with three other friends at 
college a league of friendship known as the quadruple 
alliance. Walpole was one member of the set; and his 
friendship with Walpole characterizes the eighteenth- 
century tone of the social half of his nature. A second 
member was West, who died young and with griefs of 
the mind as well as with ills of the body, and who left 
a charming memory of himself, both in his verses and in 
his affection for Gray, with whom he is associated as 
the true youthful comrade; and this friendship with 
West, in which there is an unusual high-bred demeanor 
considering the youth of the two, characterizes the other 
half of Gray^s nature, the more kindly and natural half, 
not more intimate, but intimate with more equality; v/ith 
Walpole one thinks of Gray's social history, with West 
one thinks of his personal charm. 



GRAY 245 

This private side of character he exhibited, it would 
seem, in his college residence during his mature life to 
younger men who were students there. The tribute that 
one of these young men paid to him, shortly after his 
death, breathes the pure spirit of such a happy relation. 
The passage is familiar, but can hardly be spared. The 
young man is writing to his mother. 

^'You know that I considered Mr. Gray as a second 
parent, that I thought only of him, built all my happiness 
on him, talked of him forever, wished him with me when- 
ever I partook of any pleasure, and flew to him for refuge 
whenever I felt any uneasiness. To whom now shall I 
talk of all I have seen here? Who will teach me to 
read, to think, to feel? I protest to you that whatever 
I did or thought had a reference to him. If I met 
with any chagrins, I comforted myself that I had a treas- 
ure at home; if all the world had despised and hated 
me, I should have thought myself perfectly recompensed 
in his friendship. There remains only one loss more; if 
I lose you, I am left alone in the world. At present I 
feel that I have lost half myself." 

Another instance of the cordiality with which he wel- 
comed youth, at least when it appealed to him at all, is 
his remark on the Swiss Bonstettin, who so uselessly tried 
to make Gray talk of his own poetry and personal affairs. 
*T never saw such a boy," says Gray; "our breed is not 
made on this model." 

A life, so untouched with worldly unrest, so withdrawn 
in happy privacies of companionship and of gentle tastes, 
so breathing the air of delightful studies, lying wrapt and 
somber in our minds between the churchyard repose and 
the collegiate hush, is almost monastic in its effect. 



246 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Yet the impression needs to be relieved by other traits. 
Gray, for example, was a traveler, and at times he es- 
caped from this seclusion of himself, for if the mind 
does not change with travel, it at least moves under differ- 
ent lights. He made the journey through France, when 
he was young, with Walpole, and went into Italy as far 
as Naples. Whether he derived it from this excursion 
or not, he had a liking for travel — I dare not call it a 
passion — but it was perhaps such an enthusiasm as 
his veins were capable of. It is said that he had mapped 
out every picturesque journey in England, and in the 
middle of the eighteenth century picturesque journeys 
in England for an elegant gentleman like Mr. Gray were 
really proofs of enterprise. He was early hardened to 
travel on the road and had knowledge of inns, and in 
these journeys was his slight taste of adventure — all 
he had. Just before he died he seemed to feel that his 
only hope lay in travel. The fact of his saying so shows 
how much travel had meant to him in his life. The 
notes he made of his Italian travel, for example, exhibit 
the quality of his mind with great clearness. He was 
mentally vastly curious; his intellectual curiosity was 
unbounded, and shows primarily in him the mind of the 
scholar ; not the mind of the thinker at all — for he 
seldom generalizes — but that of the scholar, the col- 
lector of knowledge; for knowledge may be collected like 
snuff-boxes or fossils, and the scholar's learning is not 
infrequently a sort of museum. Such a museum was 
Gray's mind. On his Italian journey one sees him in 
the act of collecting it with youthful enthusiasm. He 
catalogues the pictures and marbles, and describes and 
comments briefly upon them; he maps the cities, the 
squares and buildings, the river and the road, and the 



GRAY 247 

ruins beside the way. In Naples, especially, one is 
struck by the thoroughness with which he explored the 
ancient district to the west of the city, the diversity of 
interests he found there, the fulness, minuteness, and 
variety of his account, compressed though it is, and above 
all by the interest he took in it. His open and cordial 
spirit toward foreign things — not a frequent trait in 
first travels — is extraordinary. He was plainly a care- 
ful traveler, laborious and fruitful in observation, storing 
up multitudes of facts. This, which is so plainly seen 
in the Italian notes, is characteristic of his mind in all 
its accumulations. 

He was a connoisseur of the fine arts, not merely in 
the major arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture, but 
in prints, antiquities, gardening. He applied himself 
to natural sciences in several fields, like Goethe, and 
made the best account of English insects up to that time. 
He was profound, for his age, in history, and commanded 
foreign history in its own languages. He was as fond 
of reading travels as of traveling, and interested himself 
in geography; he investigated heraldry. He was expert 
in the literature of the art of cooking. He understood 
music. He was an excellent scholar in Greek, then a 
rare accomplishment, and very thorough in his pursuit 
of it, where he had some of the qualities of a pioneer. 
Clearly, he had a wonderfully acquisitive mind for facts, 
and also a singular capacity for the development of esthe- 
tic tastes of diverse kinds. He was a man of compre- 
hensive faculty and consequently of erudition. 

His information, however, retained the general charac- 
ter of the note-book and the handbook; it was miscel- 
laneous, but exact and detailed. For such collections as 
have been described a great deal of industry was re- 



248 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

quired, though it was an industry that might seem to 
Gray often a waste of time and a kind of laziness; in 
details one often seems bewilderingly idle, at the best, 
and Gray's mind worked by details. In the midst of 
such occupations which are in themselves the leisure of 
a college life, he sometimes found time to write, or to 
cancel, a line of his poetry, to file a phrase or meditate 
an epithet, and from one nine years to another to publish 
a poem. There was no hurry, no need; he never wrote 
for the public, nor for money; he made verses as a man 
of taste, just as he collected butterflies or prints, for 
his own pleasure. 

There is no psychological problem, no temperamental 
puzzle in Gray. The inquiry why he wrote so little, 
which seems to be the main concern of his critics, is 
futile. Ill health, low spirits, dissipation of mind on a 
multitude of pursuits and interests are alleged as one 
reason ; but great poets have been so afflicted without los- 
ing their voice. That he fell on an age of prose is also 
brought forward to account for the fact; but his own mind 
was not at all prosaic; even the pursuit of science could 
not make it so. He did not choose, did not care to write 
very much. What he did write he wished to be perfect — 
just as every letter of his manuscript is carefully made, 
even in his loosest notes. He had no great range in the 
world of poetry. He was interested in neither strong 
emotions nor great ideas. In religion being, as he said, 
no great wit, he believed in a God; and he left the 
matter there. He was never emotionally stirred by any 
great experience beyond that bereavement which is the 
common human heritage. All his life was at a low 
temperature, and the reasons of his infertility seem less 
circumstantial than constitutional. 



GRAY 249 

The classicism, in which he was intellectually bred, 
suggested and gave body and form to his development. 
He was chiefly a moralist; in substance of the Latin 
tradition, using the Roman mode of abstract imagination 
and bringing forward those contemporary eighteenth- 
century figures of Fear, or Madness, or Adversity, which 
together make a kind of philosophical and bodiless 
mythology in which man's psychical fortunes are external- 
ized like phantoms — bloodless and weak creatures that 
are to true mythology what the shade of Achilles in 
Hades was to the glorious earthly manhood of the hero. 
The treatment, however, was far better than the sub- 
stance, for he employed for this the original Greek 
method of idyllic art. He was characterized, as I have 
said, by interest in detail. In his art it is the same. 
He was a connoisseur in words, and thought that poetry 
has a diction of its own, more select than the language 
of common life, and he was careful to employ this colored 
and somewhat exquisite language, word by word. He 
built the line out of the words, and the line rather than 
the phrase is his unit of style. He filed each line, and 
composed the stanza, and of the stanzas the completed 
poem. At each step he took a short view; to have the 
fit word, the well-molded line, the stanza, the poem. In 
all this process he worked by the method of detail; it 
is what we sometimes call in verse jeweler's work, or 
miniature work. The latter phrase is the most suggest- 
ive, for it indicates that the poem is made up of suc- 
cessive pictures, linked together in a larger composition, 
or else simply left to succeed each other in a pleasing 
order. This is the classical idylhc method of verse, 
which he learned at first hand from the Greek, but in the 
English use of which he was instructed by Milton in 



2 50 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

such a poem as ^^L'Allegro" and its companion piece. 
The method is most famiHar to us in Tennyson's "Palace 
of Art" or "Lady of Shalott." 

Gray was not so finished an artist as Milton or Tenny- 
son, and one reason of this is, I think, because he was 
more directly and exclusively dependent on his taste in 
the fine arts. It is true that he had natural taste, and 
knew that poetry is good only when born in the open, 
or must be written, in Arnold's phrase, with the eye on 
the object. It is not a very adequate phrase, for it sug- 
gests realistic rather than imaginative treatment. Gray's 
eye was certainly not on any object when he wrote: — 

"Now the golden Morn aloft 
Waves her dew-bespangled wing. 
With vermeil cheek and whisper soft 
She wooes the tardy Spring; " 

but one feels in these lines the reminiscence of painting 
— the "vermeil cheek" is the glowing of the color 
softened as he had seen it on canvas and not on any 
ruddy English maiden. The whole passage is fresco 
painting; and so, it seems to me, as I read on, I see a 
painted landscape: — 

"Yesterday the sullen year 
Saw the snowy whirlwind fly; 
Mute was the music of the air, 
The herd stood drooping by." 

This is a natural scene, but it is carefully composed, the 
atmosphere of the snow-squall first, and the herd in the 
foreground. Farther on, the poem becomes frankly pic- 
torial, using the painter's art as a metaphor and not to 
form a picture: — 



GRAY 251 

"The hues of bliss more brightly glow, 
Chastised by sabler tints of woe, 
And blended form, with artful strife. 
The strength and harmony of life." 

The method of this poem is obviously that of painting 
in these passages. 

It appears to me also that he uses composition — I 
mean the grouping of figures — very often to give such 
life as is possible to those dreary figures of the family 
of sorrow, and make them pleasing; unless he does so, 
he leaves the present generation at least with a very 
dissatisfied sense of beholding merely allegoric images 
little alluring in themselves. I mean such composition 
as this: — 

"Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, 
And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind." 

So, too, the same holds of the numerous dances, rings, 
and bevies to be found in his verse, all of which seem 
to me like reminiscences of wall-painting. His imagi- 
nation was internally controlled by the art of painting, 
even when most natural; it is not merely in the occa- 
sional coloring and composition, such as I have instanced, 
but especially in his habitual careful use of perspective. 
In nearly every poem examples may be found of this 
peculiar sensitiveness to distance, and he seldom fails 
to give either horizon or centering to the view. The 
first stanza of the Eton Ode gives an easy example of 
such a prospect, complete in background, in fore- 
ground: — 

"Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, 
That crown the watery glade, 
Where grateful Science still adores 



2 52 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Her Henry's holy shade; 

And ye that from the stately brow 

Of Windsor's heights the expanse below 

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey. 

Whose turf, whose shade, whose iiowers among 

Wanders the hoary Thames along 

His silver-winding way." 

Generally, hov^ever, it is by a brief stroke that the effect, 
the idyllic picture, is given. He v^^as especially fond of 
the sight of a distant march on the mountain-side. Here 
are some instances which need only to be read — this of 
the sunrise: — 

"Night and all her sickly dews. 
Her specters wan, and birds of boding cry, 
He gives to range the dreary sky: 
Till down the eastern cliffs afar 
Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts 
of war." 

Or this: — 

"Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride 
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay, 
As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side 
He wound with toilsome march his long array." 

Or this very simple but perfect scene: — 

*Tar, far aloof the affrighted ravens sail; 
The famished eagle screams, and passes by." 

And that other eagle — 

"Nor the pride, nor ample pinion. 
That the Theban eagle bear. 
Sailing with supreme dominion 
Through the azure deep of air." 

Or for a near scene, and one illustrating Gray's love oi 
wild majesty in nature: — 



GRAY 2 53 

Hark, how each giant oak and desert cave 
Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!" 

Or, again, the virell-knowii image of the progress of 
poetry: — 

"Now the rich stream of Music winds along, 
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong. 
Through verdant vales, and Ceres' golden reign; 
Now rolling down the steep amain, 
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour; 
The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar." 

The same poem yields another of those large-motioned 
scenes on the wide prospect: — 

''Behold where Dry den's less presumptuous car 
Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear 
Two coursers of ethereal race. 
With necks in thunder clothed and long-resounding pace." 

Examination will show, I think, the predominance in 
Gray's imagination of scenes thus guided by his eye 
for coloring, composition, and perspective in the painter's 
rather than the poet's way. He uses perspective meta- 
phorically where, for example, in the laughter of the 
morning on the sea the whirlwind "expects his evening 
prey," and again, just below, where 

"Long years of havoc urge their destined course;" 

and we find it, curiously enough, transformed both to 
the sense of hearing and the realm of metaphor: — 

"And distant warblings lessen on my ear, 
That lost in long futurity expire." 

Observe, too, how in the opening of the "Elegy" the 
landscape is thus built up, with the horizon, the half- 
distance, and the foreground: — 



254 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, 
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, 
And leaves the world to darkness and to me. 

"Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 
And all the air a solemn stillness holds, 
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight. 
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds: 

"Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower 
The moping owl does to the moon complain 
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, 
Molest her ancient solitary reign; " 

and the eye is brought to rest thus on the dark church- 
yard, with its shadowy trees and obscure hillocks and 
hollows of the turf. 

Gray, then, was a poet, in the main a moralist, using 
an imaginative method to inlay the moral sentiment of 
the verse with miniatures, in the Greek idyllic mode, but 
miniatures which have in them the scope of fresco and 
canvas by virtue of his use of color, composition, and 
perspective, for which he was indebted to the fine art of 
painting, by whose means he interpreted nature and also 
realized allegory. The scope of his interest as a moral- 
ist was narrow and commonplace, and hardly exceeded 
the ordinary English view of life as a scene of misery 
of which the last act is the burial service. He relieves 
on his vision of spring, you remember, the figure of the 
convalescent invalid as the climax of happiness in that 
season; he sees the Eton schoolboys on a background 
of the actualities of life suggesting rather the hospital 
and the jail than a battle-ground; he leads all seasons 
and fortunes up to the inevitable hour and converges 



GRAY 255 

the paths of glory to the grave. It is a familiar English 
view, and was familiar to our fathers at least. He is 
not lacking in other powers, in satirical and light, almost 
gay, verse, as in the story of the cat and the goldfish, 
where he paints the fate of lovely woman. It is not a 
cheerful fate, though cheerfully described. Nor is there 
anything cheerful in Gray, except the alleviations of 
our misery by the rosy hours of morning, the fragrance 
breathing from the ground, and the bliss of ignorance 
in school days. The characteristic of Gray is a somber 
view, in which brilliant artistic colors are inlaid by an 
imaginative rendering of history and nature. His artis- 
tic faculty distinguishes him in his commonplace moral- 
ity; but as a leader in a new world, with the passion and 
power to bring it into being, he seems to have no place, 
nor was there in his life the fermentation of any pro- 
found experience. 

He does present, nevertheless, certain faint signs of the 
characteristics of poetic genius. For one thing, his verse 
was an innovation. Excepting the "Elegy," which, as 
he truly said, succeeded by its subject and would have 
succeeded had it been prose, his verse was a puzzle to his 
contemporaries and its acceptance was slow; it was 
long before men selected him as without question the 
chief poet of his generation, and longer before they knew 
that his works were a classic of his language. Yet he 
originated nothing; his originality lay only in the fact 
that, being sincere and having a sound critical faculty 
of high order, he was true to the great tradition of poetry 
which had been lost in England, and by his respect for 
Shakespeare and Milton and for the ancient classics he 
was enabled to cultivate the qualities of imagination, 
melody, and nature which are essential to poetry. He 



2 56 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

was saved from his century by his taste. He was, how- 
ever, so exceptional in this that his practice had the force 
of originaHty, being an innovation, and he to this extent 
suffered the initial contempt that a poet often receives 
in his own age. But he was an innovator, a pioneer in 
more important ways. It is obvious in his learned tastes 
that he was not only in advance of his age, but in 
advance along the whole line. His study of both science 
and history foreknew the great career of both these 
branches in the next century. He was an archeologist, 
too, in the kingdom of which many of us now live. And 
besides these broad premonitions of the age to come, he 
had the clarity of genius in three specific particulars in 
his own art. 

The first of these prophetic traits was his devotion to 
Greek. It is true that in this he was the heir of Milton 
and the humanists, but he went forward well into the 
paths of our quite different modern scholarship. Three 
times in the last century English poetry has been dipped 
in Castaly all over, and risen radiant from the bath: in 
the person of Shelley and his comrades, in that of Tenny- 
son, and in that of Swinburne. Gray was the premoni- 
tion of this, and a forerunner as was none of his contem- 
poraries. Secondly, he was a discoverer of the romance 
of primitive literature. He was made enthusiastic by 
Ossian, and valued that verse much as did men upon the 
Continent. He was attracted by Gaelic, and the monu- 
ment of this is that Welsh ode from which I have read, 
which is poetically his greatest work, with touches of 
the sublime in both its mood and language — a great 
English ode. In obeying this taste he showed that glim- 
mer of the romantic dawn, then far away, which brought 
with it the romance of the Highlands and the Sagas, the 



GRAY 257 

old Saxon poetry, the Song of Roland, and all the early 
literature of the romance tongue, and which now includes 
the ingathering from all primitive peoples. Thirdly, he 
was a lover of wild and majestic scenery, and of the 
picturesque beauty of the English land, a landscape 
lover, and even in his prose notes later poets have found 
ore for their own golden lines. In this he foreran the 
poetry of nature, which became so large an element in 
the romantic age. He did not philosophize nature, nor 
etherealize it, nor idealize it; but he saw it and re- 
sponded. In comparison with the great nature-poets, 
such as Wordsworth and Byron, his rendering of nature 
is slight indeed ; it is, perhaps, no more than the brighten- 
ing of our willow stems in the clear east winds of morn- 
ing hours, but it is a sign of spring. In these three ways, 
each a main direction of development. Gray was a sharer 
in that quality of genius by which it is symptomatic of 
the future, sentient of it, ^ and an exponent of it before 
the fact. 

But, though we may trace these ties of consanguinity 
with the great poets and find a few drops of the royal 
blood in Gray, yet if we are true to our own impres- 
sion and speak justly, I think that neither passion nor 
prescience of change are much in our minds when we 
read his verse. It is true that his poetry displays more 
passion than that of his contemporaries, in its lyric fulness 
and sweep; but, after all, it is a reminiscence and not an 
inspiration, it is stylistic passion, a passion for the roll 
and fall of words, a passion of rhetoric, and it is an echo, 
besides, given back by his classical tastes. He likes to 
show the tone and compass of his instrument, and the 
instrument is the lyre. At his best he is remembering 
Pindar; and as in that picture I read of the Theban 



258 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

eagle, he seems to be rather drawing on paper the evo- 
lutions of the bird than taking flight himself. 

Our main feeling after reading him is that he is classic. 
No other English poet gives the feeling in so pure a 
form; as if, except for the coloring of time, he might 
have written these pieces, that seem relics and frag- 
ments, being so few, in some far-off century in Ionia. 
One critic, Professor Tovey, the best it seems to me of 
Gray, says, very appositely, '^that poetry is the most 
securely immortal which has gained nothing and can lose 
nothing by the vicissitudes of sentiment and opinion." 
That is a mark of the classic, and Gray bears it. To 
rise outside of the circle of change is hardly given to 
mortals, but one mode of approaching such a state is to 
live in commonplace. Gray was a contemplative moral- 
ist, and his thought is commonplace; but if he had a 
passion for anything, it was for perfection, for finish, in 
the way of expression; and by virtue of this instinct, 
which never slept in him, he dignified and adorned the 
commonplace English view of life. He, moreover, was 
somber; and he chose for his theme the most solemn 
point of view in life, the resting place after death. He 
was very sincere in this; you will find, from early days, 
in his letters to his friends the idea that men are at their 
best, that the soul is in its best earthly estate, in the 
times of their bereavement. He certainly believed this, 
and his poetry is indebted to this profound belief. The 
"Elegy" is a universal poem, because its material is 
so commonplace that it might, as he suggested, have been 
written in prose, but it is dignified and adorned, per- 
fected in expression till it seems as inevitable in every 
word as the '^inevitable hour" itself. This artistic hand- 
ling of the theme is what the poet in Gray added to the 



GRAY 259 

phraser of commonplaces; the combination works the 
miracle that such a gentleman as Gray was, such a 
remote scholar as he was, should turn out to be the poet 
of ordinary people. Gray, as I said, was very humane; 
in essentials an ordinary human nature deepened into 
poetry by a grave tenderness of feeling and expressing 
himself with a pure clarity of thought. Though a classic, 
he does not belong with the great poets. His work re- 
minds me most often of the minor craftsmanship of the 
Greek artisans, who made of common clay for common 
use the images and funeral urns; such seems to me the 
material of his poems; but in form how perfect they are, 
both for grace and dignity, and they are adorned, like the 
Greek vases, with designs, little pictures, imitated from 
and echoing the greater arts. If the poetic fire in them 
be rather a warmth than a flame, yet they are lovely re- 
ceptacles of its half-extinct ashes. 



VI 

TASSO 

The poetic temperament is consanguineous in all the 
poets, and hence in passing from one to another one is 
always noticing some sign of kinship. Tasso reminds us 
of certain traits of both Gray and Byron; the classical 
scholarship of the one and the Mediterranean quality of 
the otiier ally them to the Italian, and the melancholy 
which in one was an elegy of the churchyard and in the 
other an elegy of nations, becomes in Tasso an elegy 
of life itself; moreover, there was in Tasso's personality 
an irritable self-consciousness that recalls Byron's ego- 
istical sensitiveness. In another way Tasso so exceeded 
Gray in power, and Byron in charm, that he seems out of 
their class; and he has always been in men's memories so 
signal an example of the misfortune that attends the poets 
as to seem almost solitary in his miseries. 

He was by his nature exposed to every acute feeling; 
and his education was such as to increase his peril, and 
make his sorrow sure. He was the son of a distinguished 
poet, of noble family, and born at Sorrento; his memory 
still haunts the place, but his residence there was brief, 
and his life is associated rather with the north of Italy, 
whence his family came from a town near Venice. Still 
a child, he was separated from his mother, his father 
being in trouble and a wanderer, and he never saw her 
afterward; it is probable that she was poisoned. He 
joined his father, and was educated at the court of Urbino, 

261 



262 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

and the Universities of Padua and Bologna. He was 
an extraordinarily precocious child, and while still at 
Sorrento had been given into the hands of the Jesuit 
fathers, who impressed upon him that religiousness which 
so deeply marked him and was the cause of much of 
his suffering. He took his first communion at the age 
of nine; he recited original verses and speeches at the 
age of ten; and while yet but eighteen, he pubHshed a 
considerable poem, "Rinaldo," which immediately gave 
him great reputation in Italy, and determined his 
career. 

He entered the service of the Duke of Ferrara, with 
whose name his biography is most closely joined. His 
life is obscure with mysteries that time has not cleared 
away. He was a favorite of the Duke; yet in the height 
of his fame, the Duke put him in prison and kept him 
there for over seven years, in spite of protests and peti- 
tions from princes and prelates and other persons of im- 
portance. It was long supposed that the reason was 
Tasso's devotion to the Duke's sister, who was his friend 
and the lady of his sonnets. The weight of opinion now 
is that, whatever concurring causes there may have been, 
Tasso's own condition and conduct gave sufficient excuse 
for restraint. He had within him the germs of insanity, 
and with every year they seem to have shown more vio- 
lent manifestation. He was full of suspicion and re- 
sentments, and repeatedly had left his patron suddenly 
and gone to others, only to return again; he had hallu- 
cinations also; and, as time went on, he saw and con- 
versed with spirits; sometimes it was his worldly or 
literary affairs, sometimes his religious fears that were 
the motives and subjects of this mental disturbance; the 
Duke said that he kept Tasso confined in order to cure 



TASSO 263 

him. He was allowed full liberty of correspondence, and 
was seen by friends and visitors. Montaigne so saw him 
— the poet being asleep apparently and shown by his 
jailer. Tasso's letters are full of details and terrible 
complaints; but how much of what he wrote may he not 
have fancied? The facts are insoluble. Some ascribe 
his madness to his love, some to his religious education. 
At all events the care of the insane was then but a poor 
sort of medicine, and prisons in those days were places 
of negligence, filth, and sickness. If only a small part 
of what Tasso relates of his confinement is true, it is 
enough to justify the pity that he has always received. 
It is singular, if there were no other reason for the Duke's 
conduct than the poet's mental state, that he should so 
obstinately have refused to let him go into the care of 
other princes and courts who were anxious to receive and 
aid him. At last he was released; and after that time he 
lived mainly at Naples and Rome, where he died at the 
age of fifty years, just before he was to be publicly 
crowned with laurel in the Capitol. 

It does not appear that, except for a few outbursts of 
violence, his insanity was such as to interfere with the 
usual action of his intellectual powers as a scholar and 
a poet; the higher faculties were left untouched, while 
his sense of fact was subject to delusion. His young 
friend, Manso, was a witness of a conversation at Naples 
between Tasso and the spirit with whom he talked; both 
voices, says Manso, were Tasso's, though he did not seem 
aware of it. Such was Tasso's madness — an over- 
excitement of genius; in consequence he passed much 
of his life in prison or in wanderings from city to city 
in Italy, often with much hardship, but oftener treated 
with kindness and great honor, except that at Ferrara 



2 64 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

the fact of his fame and his favor in the earHer years 
exposed him to the jealous persecution natural to a small 
court. He was a man very masculine in appearance, 
uncommonly tall, broad-shouldered, grave in demeanor, 
of the blond type, with blue eyes, well-exercised in the 
use of arms. He stammered, and seldom laughed, and 
was slow in talk. But this portrait from his last years, 
and the pale sunken cheeks and worn look, which are 
also mentioned, belong rather to the victim of life than 
to the young poet who wrote the great Italian epic, '7^" 
rusalem Delivered.'^ 

Tasso was a voluminous writer. His works fill thirty- 
three large volumes; but his fame is comprised within 
the limits of this epic, and of another small pastoral 
drama, "Aminta," which is related to his genius some- 
what as "Hero and Leander" is to Marlowe. Apart 
from the brutal miseries of his life, the true and unavoid- 
able tragedy of it lay in a conflict which took place within 
his own nature. He was a poet with the qualities of 
one; but his temperament was developed in a double 
way. On the one hand it was an artistic nature 
grounded in scholarship, not unlike Gray in that respect; 
on the other hand it was a religious nature grounded in 
the asceticism and exaltation of the Jesuit training of 
his precocious childhood. The two natures were contra- 
dictory; and in the lifelong struggle between them, re- 
flected in his literary work, the religious nature finally 
triumphed. In his last years he rewrote his epic, and 
left out its charm in obedience to his conscience; but 
fortunately the original version was already in the hands 
of the world, and the later one is now completely for- 
gotten. 

He had chosen his subject and sketched out parts, at 



TASSO 265 

least, of the poem before he was twenty years old; and 
as he composed, he labored over the verse, and refined 
and revised it, with great care. It was the period known 
as the Catholic Reaction, during which the Church 
crushed the Reformation in Italy and withered the 
Renaissance there, and thus prepared for Italy the cen- 
turies of her servitude from which she has arisen only 
in our day. Tasso was acutely anxious that his poem 
should be in harmony with Catholic truth and pious feel- 
ing, and he submitted it to ecclesiastical criticism; the 
wotry of his mind over the trouble that thus arose was, 
it must be thought, one grave cause of his malady; but 
though he modified the verse, he did not then entirely 
destroy what he loved so much, its poetic beauty. He 
had chosen a Christian theme, the recovery of Christ's 
sepulchre by the crusading knights, and he would treat 
it worthily, with seriousness and piety; but nevertheless 
the poetic art was a tradition, and he was bound, as a 
scholar with the tastes and principles of the Renais- 
sance, to obey the tradition of Homer and Virgil no less 
than he was obliged as a faithful son of the Church to 
listen respectfully to the views of Puritan Cardinals. He 
must write a classic epic; and the poem is, in fact, not 
only classical in its general conduct and method, but in 
detail echoes the "Iliad'' and the "^Eneid" much as Milton 
echoes the Bible, and a reader familiar with the classics 
takes the same pleasure in these echoes that a reader 
familiar with the Bible takes in the words and imagery of 
"Paradise Lost." 

The epic, however, when it came into Tasso's hands, 
had added something to the classic tradition, and had 
changed it in important particulars ; especially two things 
had been brought prominently forward, namely, magic. 



266 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

and the interest of love. The presence of these two new 
elements in their degree of development made of the epic 
so different a thing, that a new name was coined to 
describe it, and it was called a romantic epic in opposi- 
tion to the older style. Tasso's theme was an admirable 
epic subject; it was noble in itself, and one in which the 
powers of heaven and hell, whose participation was 
thought necessary in epic verse, could appropriately be 
introduced; the combatants on both sides were worthy 
champions, so that the martial interest could be well 
maintained; and the subject was made Italian and 
brought home to the present hour by the link that bound 
the poem to the House of Este, at Ferrara. In fact, 
the entire ground of the poem was near to the contem- 
porary age, in the point that the Mohammedan power 
was still a dreaded foe and held the Mediterranean, so 
that the feeling of hostility was acute, and, besides, the 
physical aspect of the Saracen East was well known; 
Italy and Christendom still faced that way. The taking 
of Jerusalem was a more contemporary topic than we 
are apt to think, and the poem appealed to a living fear 
and hatred; thus, though not a national poem, it had 
some of the qualities of one, and it stirred a martial 
ardor not wholly extinct. 

The martial interest is in the foreground, and is de- 
veloped in the verse to the greatest degree possible. The 
course of the war is deployed with skill, so as to open 
an ever wider field of operation and to increase steadily 
in importance and interest till it culminates in the fall 
of the city. In detail every kind of warfare is depicted 
— the single combat by challenge, the personal en- 
counters by accident, the melee of the armies and the 
individual fight in its midst, the night attack, the siege, 



TASSO 267 

the assault — every variety of battle, even to the cut- 
ting off and total destruction of a corps marching to 
the assistance of the Christians under a Danish chief, 
which may perhaps be exemplified for us by such an 
action as the Indian massacre of Custer's command. 
Tasso's descriptions of these scenes are admirable for 
spirit and variety of detail, and I find his military 
operations less tedious than those of most epics. In 
the contrast of the two civilizations he is also successful, 
and he renders the opposition of creed and manners, the 
barbaric and the pagan to the civilized and the Christian, 
with vividness and yet not so as to degrade the enemy. 
In the characterization, again, on both sides he is excel- 
lent, and he gives much distinctness even to the minor 
persons, which is unusual in epics, while the heroes are 
vigorously and diversely drawn. The main heroes are, 
of course, removed from the field early in the action by 
one device and another in order to give the others their 
opportunity to act, while the greater characters them- 
selves com.e in to make the climax of interest and valor 
toward the end. All this is in the ancient classical man- 
ner, like the "^neid" and "Iliad." So is the bringing in 
of the supernatural powers, the angels on one side and 
the devils on the other, corresponding to the partisan- 
ship of the gods in the old epics; but here Tasso suffers 
from the powerful rivalry of Milton. Tasso's devils 
are merely medieval monsters, and his angels have 
little to do. His imagination would in any case have 
been checked in its free action by Catholic scruples. 

The place of the old gods of Olympus is, however, 
really taken by the romantic element of magic, in obedi- 
ence to which indeed the devils also act; and it is not in 
the court of Heaven, but in the witch, Armida, that the 



268 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

counterpart of Juno's hatred for the Trojans is to be 
found. Magic had been popularized in poetry, especially 
by Ariosto, and Tasso followed here this master and the 
popular taste. Perhaps to us the poem is much en- 
feebled thereby and loses reality; it seems so to me, at 
least; it becomes almost a fable, Arabian. On the other 
hand, magic as an artistic device frees the fancy of Tasso 
and makes him the master of surprise. It is here that 
he begins to be himself, and to write with his own un- 
aided hand; but it is in the second element that he 
derived from the romantic epic — the element of love — 
that he is the master and comes to his own. If he treats 
of battle in all its phases, it is from a sense of duty, in 
part; but he depicts love in its various forms because 
it is his pleasure. War he learned from other men's 
books, and mastered by imagination; but in love he was 
lessoned only by his own heart, and in the story he gave 
out experience. It is the more singular because he was 
not of an amorous nature, but was rather indulgent to 
ascetic feelings. His imagination was warm, and it is 
rather the sentiment than the passion of love that he 
depicts; and he always blends it with nobleness of nature. 
Dante's line — "love is but one thing with the gentle 
heart" — might be the formula of all these varied scenes. 
In the second canto he introduces one such episode, 
and one that was so cherished by him that he refused to 
cut it out at the bidding of the ecclesiastics who advised 
him. It is the story of the Christian maid, Sophronia, 
who is drawn almost like a nun, and who to save her 
people confesses to an act that had incensed the tyrant 
ruler of Jerusalem; she stands at the stake to be burned, 
when her lover, Olindo, who had not dared to show his 
love, recognizes her, and at once confesses to the same 



TASSO 269 

act; it is plain that both are guiltless, but both are 
condemned to burn at the same stake. As the flames 
approach, he tells her his love as being about to die. 
The execution, however, is stayed in a natural way, and 
the two are released to a life together. Such a happy 
issue is rare, nevertheless, in Tasso. It was believed 
that in Sophronia he drew the figure of his lady, Leonora, 
the Duke's sister, and in Olindo the veiled love he bore 
her ; and thus in this fable pleaded his own cause. 

In the other great instances of his portraiture of love 
the persons are the leading characters of the poem, and 
not introduced merely episodically. He drew three 
types. Tancred, the chief Christian hero after Rinaldo, 
is in love with the Saracen warrior-maid, Clorinda; in 
his passion he is the typical knight of chivalry. Thus 
he fell in love with her at first sight, and her face at any 
time makes him oblivious to all else, even the call of 
honor in battle; she, being an Amazon and a pagan, is 
entirely indifferent to him; it is only at the last moment 
and by a miracle that, when being vizored they fight and 
he kills her, in the act of dying she asks him for bap- 
tism and is reconciled. She afterwards appears to him 
in a dream and confesses her love. Tancred is also the 
hero of the second type, Erminia, a Saracen princess 
whom he had rescued and treated with great kindness 
and who fell in love with his gentleness and nobleness. 
She was no warrior, but a tender woman to whom love 
gave courage, and she stole away from Jerusalem by 
night in the armor of Clorinda, to go to the Christian 
camp and heal him when he was wounded, for she under- 
stood the art of healing; but she was frightened on the 
way and fled to some shepherds, with whom she remains 
until near the end of the story, when she returns to care 



270 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

for him after Clorinda's death. The third type is the 
love of the witch, Armida, for Rinaldo; she enchains this 
youth, the Achilles of the poem, meaning to destroy 
him, but is overcome by her love for him, and transports 
him to her garden in the Atlantic Ocean, whence he is 
rescued by holy aid and recalled to the war. He leaves 
her, and she follows, seeking revenge, but still in love, 
and attends the pagan army; in the final defeat she is 
saved by Rinaldo, and desires to become a Christian 
through her love for him. 

These three poetic types of womanhood, the tragic 
type in Clorinda, the pathetic type in Erminia, and the 
romantic type in Armida, give a wide compass to Tasso 
in the interpretation of the passion. In each case love 
overcomes, equally master over magic, over the cold- 
ness of the Amazon, and over woman's simple heart; 
in all love is victorious. The two knights also yield to 
love; but the passion is represented rather in the women 
than the men, and hence the poem is most famous for 
these three types of womanhood rather than for its 
heroic figures, and more for love than for war. In Spen- 
ser's 'Taerie Queene," you remember, in the same way the 
female characters excel the knights in interest. Tasso 
is thus peculiarly the poet of love; excellent as he is 
in the martial and truly epic part of his task, it is in 
the romantic part and in the passion, that is rather lyrical 
than epic, that he is a supreme and unequaled master. 
It is natural to find that the traits which most attract 
his readers are those that depend on the predominance 
of love in the verse. 

It is characteristic of the poem that its atmosphere 
counts for more than its substance; the power of fasci- 
nation is in the atmosphere; and, in fact, the substance 



TASSO 271 

itself tends to pass into, to evaporate into, mere atmos- 
phere. This is an important point. You will observe 
in reading it, for example, how large a part the landscape 
plays in giving tone to the most charming scenes. It is, 
of course, Italian landscape that is used, though the 
scene is Palestine. It is, moreover, selected Italian land- 
scape — seashore, glens, quiet places in the hills; and, 
besides, this landscape is brightened and adorned, in 
the manner of painting or of stage illusion. One recalls 
especially the moonlight scenes, such as that where the 
light touching the armor of Erminia betrays her on her 
flight — or the pastoral scenes, such as the remote spot 
where she found refuge with the shepherd boys; and 
again the garden scenes, especially those of Armida's 
island, which gave to Spenser his Bower of Bliss and to 
Milton his Eden. 

It has been noticed that light rather than color charac- 
terizes the poem; it is filled with light and chiaroscuro, 
but not with hues; in fact, it seems to me that the place 
of color is, as it were, taken by sound. It is true that 
the poem has a landscape setting, characteristically 
Italian, quiet, reposeful, of ideal beauty; but it has also 
another setting in the sense of hearing, which is con- 
stantly appealed to, as if music in the strict sense were 
an element of the scene. It is not merely that the birds 
are always there, but sound in many forms breathes in 
various concords. A brief example is the charm that 
greets Rinaldo in the enchanted wood — 

"a sound 
Sweet as the airs of Paradise upsprings; 
Hoarse roars the shallow brook ; the leaves around, 
Sigh to the fluttering of the light wind's wings; 
Her ravishing sweet dirge the cygnet sings, 



2 72 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Loud mourn the answering nightingales ; sad shells, 
Flutes, human voices tuned to golden strings, 
And the loud surging organ's glorious swells," — 

all these make up a hidden orchestra heard in one. 
And again, a little farther on, it rises: 

''Impearled with manna was each fresh leaf nigh: 
Honey and golden gums the rude trunks weep; 
Again is heard that strange wild harmony 
Of songs and sorrows, plaintive, mild and deep; 
But the sweet choirs that still such tenor keep 
With the swans, winds and waves, no ear can trace 
To their concealed abode in shade or steep; 
Nor harp, nor horn, nor form of human face, 
Look where he would, was seen in all the shady place." 

Such a hidden harmony and secret accompaniment go 
through the poem, and sphere it in music as the land- 
scape spheres it in visible beauty. It is as if various 
belts, like Saturn's rings, v^^ere v^ound about the poem 
and shed colored light upon it. 

The Italian is a subtle genius, and Tasso excels in 
subtlety. It is a thing difficult to describe, but more 
even than by landscape and music the poem is enveloped 
in emotionalism, of which perhaps the constant appeal 
to pathos is the most obvious form. A simple detached 
instance is the death of the Soldan's page, in the ninth 
canto, slain in battle where like a child he was playing 
at war. Every artifice is used to enhance the mere pity 
of his savage death. Pathos, however, pervades the 
poem. Emotionalism is still more intensely present in 
the tragic and pathetic and romantic treatment of love 
directly in the three types already mentioned. It has 
been pointed out that the characteristic phrase of Tasso 
is that by which he so often expresses his failure to 



TASSO 273 

express himself — that is, his sense of the inexpressible 
— the phrase non so che, "I know not what." So he 
describes the last words of Clorinda when she asked 
baptism of Tancred, who had killed her — 

"Like dying lyres heard far at close of day, 
Sounding I know not what in the soothed ear 
Of sweetest sadness — the faint words made way." 

Tasso thus habitually at the highest moment of feeling 
takes refuge in the mystery of the unexpressed. 

It is evident that such qualities as these, beauty of 
such a type, such a use of music, such pathos, sorrow, 
and yearning of lite, cannot but impart weakness to 
a martial epic poem, as such, and diffuse through it a 
relaxation of the heroic quality. The character of the 
heroes is enfeebled in many ways — in Tancred and 
Rinaldo by the love element and in Godfrey, the leader, 
by his prudence; it is rather among the Saracens and in 
the minor Christian knights that the heroic quality is 
most purely preserved, the simple martial manhood of 
the enterprise; but, in proportion as the inward life 
enters into the characterization, as the psychology be- 
comes interesting, the epic power is diminished. 

This is equivalent to saying that in the characteristic 
part of his poem Tasso obeys a lyrical impulse. The 
emotion to which he is most sensitive is not martial, 
but tender; the things he loves are not the things of war, 
but of charm; and more and more, as his true mood 
grows upon him, he emerges in the region of mere beauty 
and delight, and sings, not the epic of action, but the 
lyric of feeling. Once, indeed, in the climax of the 
garden of Armida, the highest point of the mood is 
frankly given in a song. With all his epical dexterity. 



274 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Tasso is primarily lyrical by genius, and his love of 
landscape, music, and the emotional disburdening of his 
spirit are forms of his lyricism. Beauty, grace, kind- 
ness, gentleness, nobility, are the things he loved and 
responded to, and rather with a lament than with a 
pean. For the scene of life is presented with vigor in 
the action, it is true, by an intellectual tour de force in 
description, of which he had learned the art from books 
such as Homer; but the scene of life is also and more 
markedly represented with great melancholy in the 
thought and after-issue of the action, with unceasing and 
irrepressible sadness. The history of love in the poem 
is nowhere a happy history, and Tasso pleaded this fact 
in his strife with the ecclesiastics who disapproved of 
these scenes. The whole field of life here represented 
is one of sorrow and death — the woes of men; but the 
great test of the militant spirit of life — delight in vic- 
tory — is strangely absent. There is no joy of victory 
an)7where in the poem. Though Jerusalem falls, and the 
knights enter in triumph, this seems a very unimportant 
incident at the end, and merely winds up the poem. The 
poem is really done, when we know the fate of the lovers 
in it. 

So far from victory felt in the poem, it is the sense of 
the difficulty of life, of the thwarting of life, of its sad 
fates — the sense, in a word, of the unaccomplished — 
that most remains with the reader. The feeling of the 
inexpressible — the non so che of his favorite phrase — 
is one with the feeling of the unattained. Tasso's view 
of life thus ends not in action, but in an attitude toward 
life, a certain cast of thought and habit of emotion. It 
is not merely that action is not the true subject and 
interest of the poem; but rather emotion divorced from 



TASSO 275 

action, pure emotion; mere feeling in its own realm is 
the characteristic trait and charm of this verse; and 
therein lies Tasso's original genius as distinct from all 
that he inherited from the old masters. He was an 
extremely sensitive poet, with an excitable imagination 
cultivated in its exercise by the most highly developed 
artistic tradition, not only in poetry but in all the arts; 
but from his precocious adolescence to the close of his 
career, he was brought in contact with real life only 
in the sphere of the sentiments, and for the most part only 
in the region of an ideal love for the Lady Leonora. His 
touch on life had been almost exclusively through the 
imagination, and his pleasures and sorrows had been in 
that realm, in a true sense. No wonder he became vis- 
ionary even to the point of mental disease, that is, of 
hallucination; but in the sphere outside of hallucina- 
tion his ordinary daily life was still imaginative. It 
was natural that there should grow up in such a genius 
a prepossession for emotional states little related to 
action, a love for emotion just for its own sake, as if it 
were the effect of a drug. 

The point of culture he marks lies, thus, in emotional- 
ism toward beauty and joy, sensuously felt through their 
charm, but becoming an end in itself for the sake of the 
emotion only. This is the secret of his love of music, 
for it is in music that emotion is most freely experienced 
in this pure form disjoined from action. In his poetry 
art is seen on the way to music, and his lyrical passion 
is the intermediate stage. It is historically plain, be- 
cause his pastoral drama "Aminta," in which these quali- 
ties I have dwelt on are shown free from any epic 
entanglement, was the beginning of pastoral drama in 
Italy — that is, it ushered in Italian opera. Tasso, by 



2 76 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

virtue of this possession of his genius by emotion for its 
own sake, is the forerunner and prophet of the age of 
music soon to dawn after him, and in the coming of 
which he assisted. 

You will observe that Tasso exemplifies with singular 
precision the main principles that were laid down with 
respect to the general nature of poetic energy. Though 
he was a scholar from boyhood and steeped in the aca- 
demic learning of his time, and master of the earlier 
tradition of literature ancient and modern, and was so 
expert with his mind that he could, like Pope, compose 
in his teens a work seemingly mature and excellent 
enough to make him at once, like Byron, and younger 
than Byron, the best poet of his time, nevertheless, it 
was not by this weight and compass of learning nor by 
anything intellectual that his genius succeeded; but it 
was by his pov/er of emotion. Emotion is found to be, 
in a singularly pure form, the substance of his epic, its 
center of interest, its core from which its power radiates. 
Secondly, though by the traits of his epic, its classical 
and romantic handling, its relation to luxury and the 
arts, its piety, and much else both in structure and de- 
tail, he belongs to the Renaissance, and the great emo- 
tional upheaval due to that rebirth of the soul and senses 
of man, and is in fact the last child of that age in his 
own land, and hence is to be counted in that group, 
nevertheless, he is also a forward-looking man, and an- 
nounces the new and approaching age of music. In the 
most intimate and personal part of his genius he deals 
with emotion as it is under the condition of music, and 
attempts in poetry the characteristic effects of music, 
endeavoring to realize emotion for its own sake. He is 
thus in his genius prescient of the change of the mood 



TASSO 277 

in the race, and attaches himself to a modern time by 
the link of the opera and by the use of his imagination, 
specially in the highly artificial forms of the pastoral and 
of magic; that is, he frees himself as much as possible 
from realism in the scene, and disengages emotion from 
actuality in the manner of the opera. It is unfortunate 
for his fame that he thus stood, as it were, between two 
arts, poetry and music. Among epic poets, he professed 
to fear only Camoens, of his contemporaries; his inferi- 
ority to the greatest, such as Homer and Virgil, is ob- 
vious, and in majesty he falls short compared with Mil- 
ton; he cannot be ranked among the greatest poets in 
epic verse. The reason appears to be that in his martial 
verse he follows a literary tradition and is at best doing 
by main force what others had done; while in his emo- 
tional verse he is experimenting in a kind of art which 
reaches perfection rather in music than in poetry. He 
was too late for martial epic; he was too early for musi- 
cal emotion; but his genius foreknows the moods of 
music. Thirdly, his genius is grelatest and most effi- 
cient in proportion as it is unconscious of itself in its 
art. That part of his work which was intellectually and 
consciously determined was the martial part, the struc- 
ture of the action and placing of the episodes, the imi- 
tations of his predecessors — all, in brief, that he derived 
from the classical and romantic tradition, from books. 
If he had done only this, he would have written only a 
respectable poem, like a hundred others, which would 
have soon been forgotten or listed only in the history 
of his country's literature. What he added out of his 
own heart — the poetry of love ensphered in landscape, 
melody, pathos, sentiment, sensuousness ^ — and seized 
most intimately and passionately in the form of an 



2 78 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

inexpressible longing without issue — all this was the 
flowering of the unconscious, the original part of him — 
that which was least indebted for subject or method to 
other men and former poets. The primacy of emotion, 
the prescience of the future, the guiding and prevailing 
power of the unconscious element in his genius are 
clearly seen. 

The characteristic marks are just as plainly to be 
seen in his personal temperament and worldly fortunes. 
A precocious boy, he had extraordinary sensitiveness and 
extraordinary creative faculty, and under the excitement 
of a fevered and unhappy life his senses blended with 
his creative faculty and made him a visionary — the 
victim of his faculties. He was a courtier and a scholar, 
and both are careers naturally subject to annoying jeal- 
ousies, to envy and detraction and intrigue; he had no 
power of wise conduct in unhappy circumstances, and 
his long and miserable imprisonment in the flower of his 
manhood was the result; yet in his life he was much 
honored and befriended in general; his fame, which he 
highly valued, was always a solace to him. Looking 
beneath the obvious facts, however, it appears to me 
that one reads an old and familiar tragedy of life. He 
was from birth a man framed for the natural enjoyment 
of life, and especially for its esthetic enjoyment; he was 
a man to whom beauty and delight appealed in the most 
noble, sweet, and penetrating way, and his original sensi- 
tiveness was developed to the full by high cultivation. 
Two barriers, nevertheless, rose between him and life. 
He loved a princess, not of his own world, and conse- 
quently he was filled with that ideal passion which is 
the tradition of Italian poetry and which is full of senti- 
ment, of unrealized emotion. Secondly, he was trained 



TASSO 279 

by the Jesuit fathers, in charge of his boyhood, to an 
ascetic habit and view, and to a fear of displeasing 
heaven; and, as time went on, this element in him, which 
always fought with his poetic impulses and power, made 
him cancel the best of his verse. In these two ways his 
natural enjoyment of life was blocked. He responded 
to the call of life with his senses and imagination; we 
read his true nature, in this way, by the charm of the 
things he loved. Yet, under the conditions, it is not 
strange that the main impression left by his poetry is 
that here is written the despair of a heart in love with 
life. It is this despair that gives such poignancy to his 
pathos, such melancholy to the verse, and such yearning 
force to his lyrical cry of the beauty, the joy, and the 
extinction of life. 



VII 

LUCRETIUS 

Last year, in my wanderings through Sicily, I came 
to the old town that was once Acragas, and I had the 
happiness to abide there quietly for a while, where so 
long ago between the sea and the mountains stood what 
Pindar called ''the most beautiful city of mortals." I 
remember I would go down to the ruins, where, in the 
midst of immense broken columns, lay on the ground 
a great stone figure of a Titan, with his face looking to 
the broad, empty blue sky; and it seemed to me like an 
unwritten poem of Victor Hugo, as if the Titan in a sort 
of triumph lay there on his back in the center of the 
fallen temple of Zeus, his foe and oppressor, and looked 
up with a stony, sardonic satisfaction into the now throne- 
less ether. It was a Mediterranean mood. And often, 
wandering about through the region, I remembered that 
sage of antiquity, who is to us hardly more than a sound- 
ing name, Empedocles — about whom you may recall 
Arnold wrote a poem "Empedocles on Etna" — who was 
for all time the chief glory of Acragas. He was a poet 
and priest, a man of science and affairs; even — as he 
said — powerful in magic, almost with divine power, so 
excelling both to himself and the citizens seemed his 
faculty. He occupied himself with great works of 
public utility, using novel means; he opened a path for 
the north wind through the hills in order to shield the 
city from the heats of summer; he turned the bed of a 

281 



282 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

river, and poured it through a vast marsh and so drove 
the pestilence away forever; he raised a woman from 
seeming death by his medicinal art; and it is little won- 
der, in those days, that when he came forth, being a 
noble of the state, tall, clad in purple robes and with long 
streaming hair, and walking in golden sandals, attended 
by his retinue of followers, the people saluted him with 
such reverence as is akin to religious awe; such honor, 
let us say, as was paid to holy men in medieval cities. 
Often I thought of him, and wondered how it could have 
been — so impossible and remote seemed the picture in 
the denuded plain; and I remembered the words of 
Lucretius, whose enthusiasm for great minds is one of 
his engaging qualities, in which he laid his laurel on 
the memory of Empedocles, whose genius was kindred 
to his own: — 

^'Him within the three-cornered shores of its lands 
that island bore, about which the Ionian sea flows in 
large cranklings, and splashes up brine from its green 
waves. Here the sea racing in its straitened firth, 
divides by its waters the shores of Italians lands from 
the other's coasts; here is wasteful Charybdis, and here 
the rumblings of Etna. . . . Now, though this great 
country is seen to deserve in many ways the wonder of 
mankind and is held to be well worth visiting, rich in 
all good things, guarded by large force of men, yet seems 
it to have held within it nothing more glorious than this 
man." 

With the same lonely grandeur that Empedocles bore 
to Lucretius, with the same solitary preeminence, Lucre- 
tius stands forth to my eyes from Roman time, which 
"seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than 
this man." I may not be able to carry you along with 



LUCRETIUS 283 

me in this enthusiasm; for the subject is difficult, the 
matter of his poem is hard and dry, unintelHgible indeed 
to a modern reader without special preparation to under- 
stand it; and yet, though time has thus petrified large 
portions of it, the poem burns with a far deeper vigor 
than flows in the poets whose fiery genius I have hitherto 
tried to interpret to you. It is the passion not of the 
blood, but of the mind; not for a nation's glory like 
Camoens, but for the welfare of man's race; not issuing 
in despair like Byron and Tasso, but in the control of 
life. It is the intellectual passion to serve mankind in 
the ways of knowledge. 

Just as poetic genius is often a double star — as 
Shakespeare was both poet and dramatist, and as Plato 
was both poet and philosopher, and the poetic element 
was primary in both of them — so Lucretius was a poet 
and a man of science, and the poetic element was 
prim^ary in him. The subject matter of his work is 
science, a theory of physics, explanations of natural phe- 
nomena, astromony — that is, the science of the ancient 
world. For the most part, as science, it is in matters 
of detail now merely curious reading, useful in reminding 
us that science as well as religion has a history of early 
fables and a past littered with errors; but that is all. 
Personally, I find something refreshing in coming in 
contact with this childhood of science, just as one finds 
it in those passages of Plato where he treats incidentally 
of similar subjects; and it makes for intellectual modesty, 
when one comes upon these provinces of ignorance in 
the serious works of the great, for even in our own cul- 
ture may there not be just such childhood tracts, as they 
will seem hereafter? But a better reason why the old 
sages of Greece, like Empedocles, interest me is that 



284 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

there I feel myself, more clearly than elsewhere, at the 
very birth of that Greek reason, in whose advent lay, as 
it seems to me — I do not say eternal salvation — but 
the salvation of our race here on earth. I like to read 
such passages of these old poems as express man's first 
sense, not of the difficulty of virtue, but of the quite as 
important difficulty of knowledge. It sometimes seems 
to us that the early Greek sages were overweening — 
indeed the very types of omniscient self-conceit; but 
this is partly because of the universality of their theories, 
and partly it is the after-effect of Socrates' sarcasm upon 
our minds. Hear what Empedocles said, four centuries 
before Lucretius: — 

"Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the 
limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and 
blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the 
life in death through which they toil; then are they 
borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what 
they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled 
on, in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all 
that they have learned the whole — vain fools ! for what 
that is no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it 
be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou 
hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human 
wisdom may attain." 

Lucretius, however, is little embarrassed by any doubts 
of the amount and kind of his knowledge; and as one 
reads his explanation of specific natural phenomena, given 
out with such assurance, one is reminded of that tone 
of knowingness still familiar to us in the eager and plaus- 
ible scientist. But to leave on one side this detail, 
which is as compact of error as the lives of the saints, 
there are certain conceptions and ideas of a more favor- 



LUCRETIUS 285 

able and just notion of Lucretius' true attainment in a 
scientific grasp of the world. These ideas are simple 
and few; but to estimate them justly it must be remem- 
bered on what a background they are relieved, how 
recent was any natural knowledge, how close was the 
world of primitive mind, how small that world was, 
how near the gods were in it, scarce a hand-breadth off 
— how Lucretius himself lived in a Mediterranean world 
seething with idolatries; it is against the barbarian in- 
heritance of paganism, against its Egyptian mysticism, 
its magical practices, its long-consecrated ceremonial 
rites — in a word, against the pagan attitude to nature 
that these ideas stand forth; and in them slowly forming 
was the creation of a new world, the world of thought 
in which we now live. 

In the first place, in room of that small Ol5mipian or 
Nilotic world where the gods were near, he conceived of 
infinite space, thronged with systems of worlds, uni- 
verses like our own. It is hard for us to think rightly 
of the sequent steps of man's progress, to realize, for 
example, the epoch-making change of such a thing as the 
discovery of the ways to work metals, or of cultiva- 
tion of the olive and of corn, or of the alphabet. Now 
we think of the epoch of the expansion of the mind as 
being coincident, say, with the substitution of Coperni- 
can for Ptolemaic astronomy; but when the idea of infi- 
nite space was first intelligently conceived so that the 
man knew what he was thinking, that was the moment 
of expansion to which all others are dwindling points; 
that was a sublime moment in the history of man's mind, 
though since such knowledge was not so readily transmis- 
sible as a material discovery, like the culture of corn, 
the effects of the act are more slowly apparent. The 



286 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

thought of infinity was old when Lucretius received it; 
but it must not be considered that the infinity of the 
universe was the same to him as to us. He beheved, for 
example, that the sun and moon and stars actually are 
of the size that they appear to us to be; and he filled 
space with systems conceived on that pattern. Never- 
theless, he had acquired for his thought a scale of infinity; 
and it gave to his conception of things a sublimity not 
unlike that which the same scale gives Milton in "Para- 
dise Lost." 

Secondly, he conceived of nature as an energy exist- 
ing in this infinite, and infinite itself; and in the analysis 
of energy he found the other pole of thought, the infin- 
itesimal, the atomic; for all matter is composed of the 
atoms, infinite in number, and themselves imperceptible 
to the senses. In other words, he conceived of nature, 
on modern lines, as an unseen energy — the unseen uni- 
verse, as we sometimes call it — the microscopic, the 
molecular, the ethereal wave of force, however consti- 
tuted, which is invisible, but out of which in combi- 
nation the visible world of nature emerges to our gross 
senses. The world of nature was thus to him, essen- 
tially, a world of the mind's eye; the veil of sense had 
fallen, and he saw what was behind. This theory he 
derived, as he did all his knowledge, from the Greeks, 
those few lonely thinkers who were the light of that 
early world. The idea itself, however, was a great 
achievement of thought, and one of the most fruitful 
legacies that the antique world transmitted to us. 

Thirdly, he conceived of energy as organized; the 
atoms were different in kind, and limited in the number 
of kinds, and by their combination formed various species 
of things, as we may call them, and these species were 



LUCRETIUS 287 

fixed, so that a certain combination produced one spe- 
cies only, and if that species had in itself the power of 
reproduction, it reproduced only its own species. Every- 
thing thus, he said, has ^^its limit and deepset boundary 
mark." This clearly is nature organized. Fourthly, 
he conceived of energy as a flux, an element of change, 
an incessant action and transformation of the atomic 
groups dissolving and recombining, which is the process 
of nature. Fifthly, he conceived of energy as perfectly 
conserved in this process; there is neither loss nor addi- 
tion; the sum remains always constant. Sixthly, he con- 
ceived of energy as absolutely law-abiding, subject 
neither to interference nor caprice nor default, unchange- 
able in its certainty. It is, perhaps, by the strength with 
which he grasped this idea of the invariable order of 
natural law that he most affects the admiration of modern 
times, partly because of the intensity of feeling with 
which he clings to it; it is the anchor of his faith. To 
sum it up, Lucretius conceived nature as an unseen, or- 
ganizing, ceaselessly active, perfectly conserved, and law- 
abiding energy, working in infinite space and itself infi- 
nite. This is not unlike the scientific idea that we know. 
To turn to the history of the universe, it appeared 
to Lucretius that in the ceaseless action of infinite atoms 
in infinite space sooner or later there would arise the 
particular combination from which the world phenomena 
known to man followed. He did not believe that the 
world was very old, and he thought the history of man 
quite recent. There is in his physical theory a rude doc- 
trine of evolution, of the centering of the sun and moon 
and the solidifying of the earth; and man arising out of 
nature, with other species of things, was half-beast, savage 
and rough and pitiable, and was gradually by his own 



288 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

efforts civilized. He notices the extinction of species in the 
conflict for life, and he assigns to the softening influence 
of children a great share in raising man from the savage 
and brutal state. Some of you may remember that John 
Fiske was believed to have added an original contribu- 
tion to the doctrine of evolution by the influence he 
assigned to the prolongation of the period of infancy. 
It is a curious parallel. But it is enough to say that in 
his theory of the origin of civilization, language, the arts, 
and all that concerns the primitive history of mankind, 
Lucretius is quite in harmony with modern thought, 
even to the analysis of the influence of dreams in gen- 
erating some important human conceptions with regard 
to the soul. As he thought that the life of mankind and 
of our universe had not been long, he also believed that 
the v/orld had grown, even in that time, old, and was 
losing its strength; his mind was prepossessed with the 
idea of the dissolution of things as the natural term of all 
combinations of atoms, and it is a curious sign of the 
sense of insecurity then belonging to the human mind 
to find him thinking that the world as we know it would 
end in a catastrophe, which he apparently anticipated as 
likely to occur at any moment, when the frame of things 
should fall in and the atomic storm fly dispersed abroad. 
Such in brief is the view of the world which Lucretius 
presents. 

It is not, however, the science of Lucretius that inter- 
ests me; it is incidental to my main purpose, which is 
rather to set forth the poet. Yet it was science which 
gave to Lucretius the ample career of his mind. He was 
excited and enfranchised by it, and in these ideas he 
seemed to have received, as it were, the freedom of the 
universe, to go fearless and unquestioned where he would, 



LUCRETIUS 289 

as he describes his master, Epicurus, who, he says, 
'^traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeas- 
urable universe, whence he returns a conqueror to tell 
us what can, what cannot come into being — on what 
principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep- 
set boundary mark.'' Lucretius had reached in these 
conceptions the seats of the wise, which he describes in 
a famous passage: — 

"It is sweet, when on the great sea the winds trouble 
its waters, to behold from land another's deep distress; 
not that it is a pleasure and delight that any should be 
afflicted, but because it is sweet to see from what evils 
you are yourself exempt. It is sweet also to look upon 
the mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains 
without sharing yourself in the danger. But nothing 
is more welcome than to hold the lofty and serene posi- 
tions well fortified by the learning of the wise, from which 
you may look down upon others and see them wandering 
all abroad and going astray in their search for the path 
of life, see the contest among them of intellect, the rivalry 
of birth, the striving night and day with surpassing effort 
to struggle up to the summit of power and be masters of 
the world. O miserable minds of men! O blinded 
breasts!'' 

It is from such a height that Lucretius is always seen 
looking down. For he had about him the horizons and 
perspectives of a new world. In another famous and 
peculiarly Roman passage he says: "When mighty 
legions fill the plain with their rapid movement, raising 
the pageantry of warfare, the splendor rises up to heaven, 
and all the land about is bright with the glitter of brass, 
and beneath from the mighty host of men the sound of 
^ir tramp arises, and the mountains, struck by their 



290 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

shouting, reecho their voices to the stars of heaven, and 
the horsemen hurry to and fro on either flank and sud- 
denly charge across the plains, shaking them with their 
impetuous onset. . . . And yet there is some place 
in the lofty mountains whence they appear to be all still, 
and to rest as a bright gleam upon the plains." 

This is the new perspective from which Lucretius looks 
on human life. He was the only Roman who transcended 
Rome. He sees Rome itself as but one of the swift 
runners who hand on in turn the torch of life among the 
nations. He was a Roman, and of an ancient house; 
but he despised alike imperial power and vastness of 
wealth. Rome spread material dominion over the earth, 
but he saw only the dominion of the mind as a thing 
worthy of man's dignity. Rome subjected men in their 
bodies, but his passion was to enfranchise the souls of 
men and bring them to a birth of freedom. For Lucre- 
tius was deeply endowed with that social sympathy which 
belongs to poetry by its own nature, as I have said; and 
the main motive of his poem was not knowledge, not the 
scholar's motive, but was service, the poet's function. 
It was not for science that he deeply cared, but for its 
effects on the minds of men. 

He looked abroad over human life, and he often depicts 
it in the large; he sees it without a veil and tells it with- 
out a lie; there is no golden age in man's past for him — 
only the bestial misery and blood-stained cruelty of 
savage life from which man rises with vast effort and 
suffering; or, he shows, as at the end of the poem, the 
plague at Athens, a terrible scene of human wretched- 
ness; or, he singles out of the high luxurious life of the 
age the Roman noble — "driving his horses, he speeds 
in hot haste to his country house, as if his house were on 



LUCRETIUS 291 

fire and he was hurrying to bring assistance. Straight- 
way he begins to yawn, so soon as he has reached his 
threshold, or sinks heavily into sleep, or even with all 
haste returns to the city." It is the picture of speeding 
wealth in our own day. Lucretius renders life as he 
sees it, in its past and present; and his words are blended 
of irony, reproof, and sorrow. He had broad and natural 
sympathies; and his sympathy, though not lacking in 
individual touches, is nevertheless mainly impersonal and 
racial ; it is for the race rather than the man that he has 
pity and commiseration. That is why he wrote his poem 
of which the aim is not scientific but philanthropic. He 
saw mankind under the yoke of superstition; the critics 
say that he exaggerated the terrors of the supernatural, 
which did not so afflict men in paganism. I am not 
competent to gainsay their opinion, yet my own mind 
refuses to see the Mediterranean world of those ages 
other than as he described it — permeated with supersti- 
tious fear and barren pagan practices through all its 
million-peopled coasts; so, at any rate, it seemed to him, 
and he lifted his hand to wither this immeasurable evil, 
the chief and fruitful source of men's woes, at the root. 
It is at superstition, as at the old dragon, that every 
glittering shaft of reason is shot in these golden lines. 

Lucretius identified all religion with superstition, and 
meant to uproot it from the minds of men and entirely 
eradicate it. He opposed in sharp contrast the pagan 
view of the world, under which man and nature were the 
sport of the gods, and the view of Greek reason in which 
the divine element in every form was excluded both from 
nature and human life. The state of man as Lucretius 
saw it, under paganism, was one of servitude to fear; 
under this idea of the Greek reason it was one of free- 



292 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

donij of dignity, and its worst estate one of noble forti- 
tude and self-respect. He desired to establish this reign 
of reason, in place of paganism, and to follow in the foot- 
steps of his master, Epicurus, who had opened the way 
and brought this light into the world. At the outset of 
his poem he describes this achievement of Epicurus and 
what it meant for mankind: — 

"When human life lay foully prostrate upon earth, 
crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed 
her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect 
lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first 
to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to with- 
stand her to her face. Him neither story of gods nor 
thunderbolts nor heaven with threatening roar could 
quell; they only chafed the more the eager courage of 
his soul, filling him with desire to be the first to burst 
the fast bars of nature's portals. Therefore the living 
force of his soul gained the day; on he passed far be- 
yond the flaming walls of the world and traversed 
throughout, in mind and spirit, the immeasurable uni- 
verse. ... Us his victory brings level with heaven." 

It is always a great moment when mankind looks at 
its gods with level eyes; and, in this case, the gods 
seemed to Lucretius to vanish and remove far away. 
He believed that these gods that men worshipped with 
altars and sacred rites over the whole earth, and honored 
with festal days, were the coinage of man's brain, and 
man had placed them in heaven and given them charge 
of all things: — 

"0 hapless race of men, when that they charged the 
gods with such acts, and coupled with them bitter wrath! 
what groanings did they then beget for themselves, what 
wounds for us, what tears for our children's children! 



LUCRETIUS 293 

No act is it of piety to be often seen with veiled head 
to turn to a stone and approach every altar and fall 
prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before 
the statues of the gods and sprinkle the altars with much 
blood of beasts and link vow on vow, but rather to be 
able to look on all things with a mind of peace." 

Nor, says Lucretius, in his opening lines, should any 
fear that the ground of reason is unholy and her path 
the path of sin; rather it is religion that is sinful. And 
he goes on to draw that picture of the human sacrifice 
of Iphigeneia by Agamemnon, her father, when the Greek 
ships crossed to Troy, as a capital instance of the evil 
to which religion inclines the hearts of men. He puts 
this picture in the forefront of his poem as a landmark 
of its thought; it was from such monstrous acts, and the 
mood which is their parent, that life could be freed; 
in other words, the capital thought of the poem is that 
Hfe must purify itself. For Lucretius looked on life 
as not so much wretched because of external calamity 
visited upon man, but because of those woes to which 
his own will consents and in which it is by folly or 
fear an accomplice; religion in particular was some 
thing of which man could rid his bosom, since it was 
born of it. To this end, then, Lucretius strove; it is 
with passion that he pleads the cause, and it is this 
passion which underlies the intellectual vigor of the pano- 
rama of nature in her acts and scenes which he unfolds, 
and also the profound moral sympathy with which he 
displays the human lot under nature's dispensation. It 
is, therefore, not exposition but persuasion that he has 
in view, and for this reason he inlays the verse with pic- 
tures, in the old way — Gray's way — and puts truth 
forth as poetry. 



294 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

His procedure is easily understood. "This terror, 
then," he says, "and darkness of mind must be dispelled 
not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, 
but by the aspect and the law of nature." He excludes 
the gods from dominion over nature on the ground that 
the universe is infinite and command of it is beyond 
their power. Man's conception of the world had out- 
grown his conception of the gods. "Who can order 
the infinite mass? who can hold with a guiding hand the 
mighty reins of immensity?" Lucretius says. And again 
he excludes intelligence from nature on the ground of the 
imperfection of the world; it is obviously not the work 
of intelligence. Intelligence belongs to man alone; it is 
the accident of his being, and will vanish from the uni- 
verse with him. We are not concerned with the truth 
of the statement, but with the fact. What a step it was, 
what a power it showed in man to change his mind! 
What a masterly reversal of the point of view this is, 
in comparison with that universal habit of old time 
which projected human life into all things and gave the 
early peoples over to animism, polytheism, and all the 
subtler forms of anthropomorphic thought as it fades 
away in philosophy and metaphysics. It is by just 
such reversals of universal past beliefs that the progress 
of reason is marked. 

All this argument against the gods proceeds, you ob- 
serve, not on moral but on intellectual grounds; that is, 
it is a characteristically Greek mode of thought. The 
citadel of superstition, however, in Lucretius' eyes was 
rather in the fear of something after death than in the 
presence of the gods in this life and the world of nature. 
He met this fear by the simplest mode of attack, and 
denied the immortality of the soul. It is not necessary 



LUCRETIUS 295 

to go into his argument. To me the most remarkable 
thing about it is not the argument nor the belief itself, 
but the grave and almost tender considerateness with 
which Lucretius tries to reconcile men to this belief — 
it is almost as if he were talking to children, with a 
gentle but firm insistence, and with entire understanding 
of their disturbed fears and sympathy with them, but, 
nevertheless, if they will listen, the fact is not only really 
so, but best, a blessing, the greatest blessing that can 
come to heal the wounds of men and give them peace. 
This lulling tone in the argument always reminds me of 
the persuasive melody of the verses in the ^Taerie 
Queen," where Despair wooes the knight to self-destruc- 
tion. In no part of the poem is Lucretius more vividly 
in sympathy with life in its natural happiness. ''Soon," 
he says, "shall thy home receive thee no more with 
glad welcome, nor thy true wife, nor thy dear children 
run to snatch the first kiss, touching thy heart with 
silent gladness." Nowhere is he more gravely eloquent: 
"Death, therefore, to us is nothing; . . . and as in 
time gone by we felt no distress when the Carthaginians 
from all sides came together to do battle, and all things 
shaken by war's troublous uproar shuddered and quaked 
beneath high heaven, and mortal men were in doubt 
which of the two peoples it should be to whose empire 
all must fall by sea and land . . . thus when we shall 
be no more . . . nothing whatever can happen to excite 
sensation, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea 
with heaven." Nowhere does he speak with more dig- 
nity, like a Roman: "Why not, then, take thy departure 
like a guest filled with life — and with resignation, thou 
fool, enter upon untroubled rest?" "Now resign all 
things unsuited to thy age, and with a good grace up 



296 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

and greatly go: thou must." "Even worthy Ancus has 
quitted the light, . . . the son of the Scipios, thunder- 
bolt of war, terror of Carthage, yielded his bones to 
earth just as if he were the lowest menial. . . . Even 
Epicurus passed away when his light of life had run its 
course, he who surpassed in intellect the race of man. 
. . . Wilt thou then hesitate, and think it a hardship 
to die? . . . None the less will that everlasting death 
await you. . . . Thus it is that all no less than thou 
have before this come to an end, and hereafter will come 
to an end; . . . and life is granted to none in fee- 
simple, but to all in usufruct." 

Such are some of the passages in which Lucretius, 
like a patient but high-minded teacher, endeavors to 
reconcile the minds of men to their good. For in his 
eyes to escape from the evil, whose bondage is a state 
of supernatural fear, is to find the door of life itself — 
the door of that life still possible to men which, he says, 
though on earth, may be a life "not unworthy of the 
gods." 

For when Lucretius had excluded divine power from 
the constitution and government of nature — and he 
goes on to show that all events are merely natural phe- 
nomena — and when he had quieted the fear of some- 
thing after death by denying immortality to the soul, 
he had, nevertheless, performed only the negative part 
of his task. He had, besides, to build up an ideal of 
wise life under such conditions. The view that great 
poets take of human life is never very rose-colored; and 
Lucretius is no exception to the rule. The picture that 
he gives of the child at birth is very famous: "The 
babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies 
naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid 



LUCRETIUS 297 

to life, when first nature has cast him forth by great 
throes from his mother's womb; and he fills the air with 
his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass 
through so much misery in life.'' Human nature itself 
is very imperfect ; it is, says Lucretius, like a leaky vessel 
that will not retain even the blessings that are poured 
into it, and moreover it vitiates these goods inwardly 
by a certain taint and nauseous flavor, as it were, pro- 
ceeding from itself. The discovery of wisdom that could 
in any way remedy these objects seems to Lucretius a 
marvelous action: ^'a god he was," he says, "a god who 
first found out that plan of life which is now termed 
wisdom." It was a more divine gift than corn or wine, 
for life could go on without these; but "a happy life was 
not possible without a clean breast." The deeds of 
Hercules were nothing in comparison. "The earth even 
now abounds in wild beasts and is filled with troublous 
terror throughout woods and great mountains and deep 
forests; places which we have it for the most part in 
our power to shun. But unless the breast is cleared, 
what battles and dangers must then find their way into 
us in our own despite ! What cares, what fears ! — and 
pride, lust, and wantonness, what disasters they occa- 
sion! and luxury and sloth! He therefore who shall 
have subdued all these and banished them from the mind 
by words, not arms, shall he not have a just title to be 
ranked among the gods?'^ It is a Roman who is thus 
exalting the victories of peace over those of war, and of 
reason over arms. He builds then his ideal of a life, 
content with little, free from lust for political power or 
riches or pleasures, strong in natural affections and in 
the reasonable satisfaction of our needs, and with power, 
if not to escape calamity, at least by fortitude to blunt 



298 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

the edge of evil. To learn this wisdom is the best use 
of life in the brief interval that life shall be ours. 

Such, in rough outlines, is the teaching of Lucretius. 
He does not deny the existence of the divine gods; but 
they live remote from man, like him a part of nature in 
their own mode of existence, and to be careless of man- 
kind is a part of their blessedness. It would be easy 
to appear to find in that principle of energy, that vigor 
which is nature, whose force is in the coming of spring 
and the gladness of cattle and in the thoughts of men, 
which is the inspiration of this poem in Lucretius also, 
as he says — it would be easy to find in this something 
like a divine principle diffusing itself in life; but it is 
not so presented by Lucretius. He excluded from life 
every thought of what is to our minds religion and the 
immortal soul ; and did it as a bringer of intellectual truth 
in the interest of man's earthly happiness. It is, perhaps, 
hard for us to realize that he seemed to himself in this a 
benefactor of his race. Yet, if we remember justly the 
pagan world, or even if we recall the vast reign of reli- 
gious superstition over mankind still throughout the world 
and realize what it is, if we remember how much of super- 
stition still persists even in the purer forms of religion, 
and to how great evils religion has inclined men's minds 
in the centuries since Lucretius wrote — if we keep some- 
thing of all this in our minds, we may better measure the 
hopes of this early thinker who first seized hold of the 
truths of science and the dominion of the pure reason 
over men's minds as if there were in it the coming of a new 
and happier age. 

Lucretius was not so much prescient of that new age 
as living in it. The sense of being a discoverer in a new 
land is one of the most vivid traits in his mind. "I 



LUCRETIUS 299 

traverse," he says, "the pathless haunts never yet trodden 
by the foot of man. I love to approach the untasted 
springs and to quaff, I love to cull fresh flowers and 
gather for my head a crown from spots whence the Muses 
have yet veiled the brows of none — because I teach of 
great things." He has this mark of the poetic faculty — 
its forward-looking gaze, its atmosphere of the virgin peak 
and the new-breaking morning. He has also the mark of 
passion — intense, overwhelming, absorbing — the pas- 
sion of the intellect for truth and of the heart for service 
to his race. He has the mark of the social bond, which 
belongs to genius. He stands, moreover, at that line of 
fracture in the thoughts of men which does not belong 
to any one age, like the Renaissance, but is the slowest 
of the great social changes — the line which marks the 
rise of reason in the government of man's thoughts. It 
is only in our own time that Lucretius has been esteemed 
according to the true measure of his greatness. But 
what a far-sighted and firm-fixed genius that was which 
could wait eighteen centuries for its true fame — 
it seems like one of those great suns of outer space 
whose light requires such length of years to reach the 
eyes of men. There is this loneliness of intellectual 
splendor, in Lucretius — this quality of solitariness in 
his genius, which I began by speaking of. I know that 
Virgil was a greater poet, and revere him above all other 
poets, but in thinking of Lucretius only the old words 
rise to my lips — "This was the noblest Roman of 
them all." 



VIII 

INSPIRATION 

You will, perhaps, remember that in opening these lec- 
tures a few general principles were suggested with re- 
gard to the nature of poetic power, and from time to 
time I have directed your attention to the presence of 
some of these principles in the six poets whose genius 
we have examined. Poetic energy was defined as, in 
essence, shared and controlled emotion; in its being 
shared emotion lies its social principle; in its being con- 
trolled emotion lies its artistic principle. I have dwelt 
less, however, on these two subsidiary aspects, and 
have sought rather to bring out clearly the primary 
fact that emotion is the base of poetry, and that capacity 
for it is the radical power of genius, and that the poetic 
life so led is naturally one of unrest and misfortune. In 
Marlowe the emotion was an aspiration of all the facul- 
ties, the individual making out toward the infinite in all 
ways; in Camoens it was emotion closely joined with 
action in a national epic; in Tasso it was emotion dis- 
joined from action and tending to the condition of music, 
in Byron it was emotion of the heart; in Lucretius it was 
emotion of the intellect. It was noticed, too, in accord- 
ance with the general principle that great literatures 
arise along the lines of fracture in human progress, that 
Marlowe was the child of the Renaissance in England, 
that Camoens was the poet of world-discovery, that 
Byron was the star of the revolutionary spirit on the 

301 



302 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

Continent, and Tasso foretold the age of music, and 
Lucretius stood in the dawn of scientific reason; each 
occupied a point of vantage, and was, as it were, a 
mountain crag that caught and flashed on a moment 
of morning light. Each represented some mood of the 
world at a culminating point, and with intensity. 

The prevailing trait of the poetic temperament in 
action — its free and lawless nature — has also been 
exemplified. These poets have left upon our minds, 
I am persuaded, a sense of their extraordinary vital power, 
of their strange difference from men in general, and of 
something that awes us in their genius as if a miraculous 
element entered into it. The sense of the mystery of 
spiritual power is felt in connection with these men. It 
is under the influence of such thoughts as these that men 
speak of poetic energy as an inspiration; they convey thus 
their sense that the faculty is something "above man," 
that it partakes of the mystery of all power in the imi- 
verse, that it is kindred with what they call the divine. 
Something — they know not what — but something 
greater than the man speaks through the man, and there 
is a virtue in his works that his own unaided power 
never placed there. I think I describe the feeling fairly 
in these words. Inspiration is a natural conviction of 
men with respect to poetry; and to the greater poets 
themselves it is as natural, for their own works and 
their states of mind in composing seem beyond and above 
themselves. This sense of possession, of being caught 
up into a sphere of greater power, is the true poetic 
madness, which is so familiar an idea in Greek thought, 
and is not yet extinct. I have thought it appropriate 
to close this various survey of the poets with some final 
remarks on this old mystery, so ineradicable; not with 



INSPIRATION 303 

any idea of solving it at aU, but merely to offer some 
few considerations with regard to it, which have occurred 
to me from time to time. Let us return, therefore, to 
that gulf which we found in the first lecture between 
the primitive dancing and singing horde and the divine 
poet, and look more closely at the phenomena. 

It has been said that "the mental condition of the 
lower races is the key to poetry"; and you may recall 
that I defined the poet as "under excitement presenting 
the phenomenon of a highly developed mind working 
in a primitive way." Primitive psychology is a sub- 
ject beyond my ken; but there are a few obvious facts 
that a modern reader can hardly escape. You will 
remember that in the dance of the primitive horde the 
rhythm is very simple, and the cry is perhaps one sound, 
interminably repeated. Monotony is, in fact, charac- 
teristic of primitive life. The repetition has certain 
uses easily seen. In all thought of primitive conditions 
it is hardly possible for us to exaggerate the feebleness 
of the human mind in its emergence from brute condi- 
tions. The first use of monotonous repetition is to fasten 
attention, a difficult thing for the savage mind; power 
of memory, the power of brain-cells to retain the mental 
image of a thing or an event, must have been greatly 
indebted to such a monotonous habit. Again, the rep- 
etition assists in labor: songs of labor are not a relaxa- 
tion but an aid; the Egyptian workmen sing when they 
are tired; again, the well-known law that every mental 
idea of an action tends to realize itself in that action is 
sufficient to account for one definite utility there is in 
the repeated utterance of such a word as "strike," say, 
in rhythm before each blow. On the passive side, also, 
it will be readily understood that monotone has an hyp- 



304 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

notic and preparatory influence on the mind. Indeed 
the monotone may be the basis, the exciting cause, or 
nervous predisposition of the wild passion which breaks 
forth and possesses the participants in the dance. Any 
of you who have ever witnessed such performances must 
have been struck by the singular coexistence in them 
of monotone and of excitement; the two are linked 
together — wild excitement such as we never dream of, 
together with monotony so insistent and prolonged as 
to seem incredible. I have never heard Tennyson read, 
but I have heard his reading precisely imitated, and 
I was struck in it by the same combination — namely, 
that as the passion grew, the chanted monotony of the 
lines stood more rigidly. It has been noticed, too, that 
poets naturally thus chant their lines. Wordsworth did 
so, and I have heard his reading also imitated with pre- 
cision. These two elements, monotony and excitement, 
are faithfully reflected in the Mohometan religion, 
which is near to primitive habits in all ways. Thus in the 
several sects of North Africa one is distinguished from 
another in various ways, and among others by the 
formula or verse which is repeated by each member a 
certain number of times daily. Thus the brotherhood 
of Abd-er-Rahman must recite their formula, seven words, 
three thousand times a day; the Tsidjani must pray at 
morning the two words ^'God pardon" two hundred times, 
followed by a longer prayer one hundred times repeated, 
and then one hundred times the formula of seven words. 
At three o^clock in the afternoon are other similar 
prayers, and at sunset the same as at morning. In Mos- 
lem mosques I have myself sometimes taken the beads 
from the priest and repeated the formulas as I wandered 
aboutj to see what it was like to live in that way. On the 



INSPIRATION 305 

other hand, in the dervish dances the element of excite- 
ment in combination with monotony is easily observed. 
It appears, therefore, that while for us monotony de- 
stroys interest and puts us to sleep, under other con- 
ditions it is the ground of the highest excitement. 

I have a theory — whether I have read it or dreamed 
it I do not know — that the emergence of man from 
the brute-stage of life was accompanied by an immense 
outburst and increase of emotional power. If it were 
so, the emotion was of this kind; and, without regard 
to the scientific ground of the theory, it appears to me 
prima facie plausible to this degree, that such emotion 
was a main condition of the gradual advent of intellec- 
tual life. If we remember how weak and unstable then 
were all mental phenomena, still perhaps more like wak- 
ing dreams than what we know as continuous and or- 
ganized mental life, and if we remember also the power 
of emotion to vivify the mental processes, it is plain that 
minds so stirred would grow and would store power 
beyond other minds. The phenomenon would be only 
what is our well-known experience taking place in a lower 
plane of being. Excitement increases the speed and 
power of the mind; the use of stimulants affords such 
excitement, and when the excitement arises naturally 
through the emotions, the effect is the same. The state 
so induced, whether naturally or artifically, does not 
differ in kind from that of inspiration — that is, a power 
above the normal from which the subject of it recedes 
when the mood is gone. Emotion, however induced, 
discharges itself according to the constitution of the man 
who feels it; and in primitive life it would discharge 
itself in this one or that one wildly, wastefully, spas- 
modically, perhaps, and in brains of a finer or stronger 



3o6 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

quality in another way, that is, along directions of 
thought. The most active brains would be those most 
capable of emotion. 

If emotion played such a part in generating intelligence, 
it becomes easier to understand the respect paid in all 
primitive times to those who are described as madmen, 
and to all who were subject to exalted psychical states 
from whatever cause; and the impulse which led men 
to cultivate, as it were, the trance state by artificial or 
semi-artificial means, which is found in all religions, 
would seem more normal. Certain it is that about the 
ancient oracles there gathered intellectual and moral 
power, and even as at Delphi great guiding power; they 
were very old places of immemorial inspiration, in all 
its defined religious forms, its trances, and ecstasies as 
well as other kinds of soothsaying; they were, in a cer- 
tain sense, the seats of truth most revered. For the 
oracles were not places of fraud; fraud entered into and 
combined with original beliefs and practices, as it has in 
other religions without number, but only in their decay. 
Originally the oracles were sincere facts of religion as it 
then was. There were other concurring causes for their 
religious primacy; but it seems not unlikely that the 
power of emotional excitement to unlock and speed intelli- 
gence may have been one element of real utility in the 
phenomenon. Facts of disease, of the action of vapors, 
of psychical states and susceptibilities that are still ob- 
scure, were no doubt involved in the entire primitive atti- 
tude to the divine madness; but in the midst of all there 
remains one thread of sense and reality in the normal 
power of excitement to set the intellectual powers in 
uncommon action. 

It is also to be observed that monotony characterizes 



INSPIRATION 307 

the primitive mind in another way than has been noticed; 
no community is so bound in convention, tradition, and 
routine as the savage horde; just as in the lower organiza- 
tions of life, the ways of doing once found are fossilized 
in invariable paths of instinct, as in the bees and ants, so 
in the primitive horde ways of behavior once established 
became conventionalized with a rigor that tyranny could 
never equal. The great difficulty to-day with the primi- 
tive African people is to persuade them to do other or 
different from their fathers. In the primitive horde every 
one conformed, and especially after superstitious religion 
began to prevail; that is, every one conformed except the 
madman — and there could be but one explanation of 
such a man, he was a sacred person, in some way touched 
with that power, which, whether it was daemonic or di- 
vine, was pretty much one to the savage mind. Thus 
primitive man regarded these various phenomena, rang- 
ing from the ordinary type of insanity up to the priestess 
of the temple, as belonging in the region of inspiration, 
of that power above man which made of them persons 
apart; and this mood toward them persisted through ages 
and far into high civilizations. The easy old-fashioned 
way was to look on all this primitive and pagan belief as 
merely a structure of superstition and fraud; but this is 
no longer possible. And it seems to me, speaking specu- 
latively and not dogmatically, that in this universal belief 
and long adherence to it we may perhaps discern some 
historic traces of the great function of emotion, as an 
evolutionary element, in disengaging and freeing and es- 
tablishing the intellectual powers of the race. 

Let us turn now to the phenomena as they appear in 
the field of civilization. There we see, as in Greece, men 
under excitement producing poems, dramas, and other 



3o8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

works at moments of exaltation; and their state was de- 
scribed by observers and by themselves as one of poetic 
madness. It was a theory universally received. What 
is it that had happened? It seems to be no more than 
in other cases of excitement, except for a peculiarity in 
the manner of the discharge of the emotion. Let me 
recur to the distinction which was alluded fo in the first 
lecture between the power of Dionysus and the power of 
Apollo, made by the brilliant and unfortunate German 
writer, Frederic Nietzsche, in an essay of his youth upon 
Greek tragedy at a time when he was dominated by en- 
thusiasm for Wagner^s music. He divided poetry be- 
tween the two : to Apollo he ascribed the intellectual part, 
the dream, the perceptive faculty, the idea as it is known 
to consciousness, the phenomenal; to Dionysus he gave 
the intoxication, the self-destruction or renunciation of 
consciousness, the revel of emotion, the unfathomed 
energy of existence; or, in brief, the form-giving element 
in poetry he described as Apollinian, the energy he de- 
scribed as Dionysiac. He worked the theory out in his 
own way. But it is interesting to find the youngest of 
our new philosophers adopting and interpreting in modern 
terms the oldest doctrine of poetry — namely, that it is 
a madness; and the distinction he draws serves to clarify 
our thoughts. Dionysus is the god who presides over 
the emotion as mere energy, as an intoxication, a physical 
and mental disturbance, an orgy of the muscles and the 
nerves, a daemoniac possession. Apollo is the god who 
presides over inspiration rather in its intellectual issue as 
a power generating fair forms and clear-shining truths, of 
which poetry is the embodiment. If you will recall what 
I have just said, that in the mass of the phenomena there 
are all sorts of wasteful emotion, but amid them there 



J 



INSPIRATION 309 

is one thread of sense and reality — there where the 
waste is, is Dionysus raving; there where the single 
thread is, is Apollo's shining hand. 

There is one idea that played a great part in Greek 
thought — the idea of harmony. Apollo is the god of 
harmony. Now the Greeks believed that there is a prin- 
ciple of harmony in the world which takes body of itself. 
It is independant of man, but it may take body through 
his mind. Thus the great temple, the Parthenon, was a 
harmony brought into being by man, yet he did not make 
the harmony. This is the view so familiar to us in 
Emerson's poem: — 

"These temples grew as grows the grass; 
Art might obey, but not surpass: 
The passive master lent his hand 
To the vast soul that o'er him planned." 

That is, there is a principle of harmony in the world 
independent of art, but through art it takes form and 
becomes apparent to the eyes or ears or imagination of 
man. Apollo is the god who so guides the original energy 
of emotion that out of it issues this fair harmony known 
through the senses and their imagery to the perceptive 
powers, that is, to the mind of men. This is what, in the 
first lecture, was called the dream that attends emotion, 
the sensuous and intellectual part; but it was also there 
said that the dream is not something added to emotion, 
but is the product of the emotion itself. The Dionysiac 
orgy ends in the physical state, and when the body is 
exhausted the emotion is spent and gone; the inspiration 
of Apollo ends in an intellectual harmony of poetry or 
music or other art, and this work abides after the emo- 
tion is spent — is indeed the enduring and eternal form 



310 THE INSriRATION OF POETRY 

of that fleeting emotional overflow in the soul and body 
of the poet and artist. It was natural that inspiration 
should gradually become restricted, as a term, to this 
particular operation of emotion by virtue of which it 
realizes for the mind the principle of harmony, whether 
under the form of reason — that is, of truth — or under 
those forms of the senses which we call the arts. In- 
spiration, then, is, in this view, emotion vivifying and 
giving clearness and speed to the intellect, out of whose 
store of memory and imagination it creates that dream in 
which it immortalizes its moment. Emotion flooding the 
higher soul of man, and not merely his physical part — 
flooding the rational soul, and there creatively productive 
according to the harmonic laws of that realm — that is 
the power of Apollo, that is inspiration in the artistic 
sense. 

Wherein, then, is the madness? for it is agreed that 
the man so affected is out of his senses and not his own 
master; he is an instrument, a voice, not personal but 
oracular; a passive master, as Emerson says, who has lent 
his body and soul to the god. Is it, then, indeed, so 
strange? or is not this a thing familiar to us all in our 
daily lives? Do we not all have such moments, so 
charged with emotion that we seem taken out of ourselves, 
so filled with intensity of life that we seem unconscious — 
moments when new truths come with a physical flash on 
the eye, when perceptions of beauty illuminate the soul 
with sudden and ample glory, when motions of love ex- 
pand the spirit and pour it abroad — and then comes 
darkness, and we fail from out the mood ; but yet do not 
altogether fail, for the memory of the truth stays with 
us, that beauty has illuminated all our days, those mo- 
tions of love have expanded the heart forever; it is on 



INSPIRATION 311 

the memory of such moments that we live. You remem- 
ber that Gray found these moments, in their most intense, 
revealing and exalted power, in the times of bereave- 
ment; and I suppose that is the commonest experience 
of humanity. But in any part of experience they may 
arise, in its gloom or in its brightness; and when they 
arise is it not true, especially if the experience be pro- 
longed or recurrent, that we seem to ourselves not en- 
tirely our own masters and to others somewhat out of 
our senses? 

The difference that makes the poet lies in the fact that 
by some peculiarity of organization he stamps an image 
of his soul at such moments in a work of art, and what 
is for us a thing of the private life becomes through 
genius a thing of the public good. He, too, fails from 
out the mood, but this work of his remains; he feels in 
the same way as we the mystery of the experience; he 
cannot repeat it; he cannot summon the inspiration at 
will; he can only observe its times and seasons, and be 
in a state of preparedness for the god — to use the reli- 
gious phrase — for inspiration has its conditions, like 
all mortal things, and these are subject to knowledge. 
If you will read Emerson's essay on Inspiration, you 
will find that he employs nearly the whole of it in laying 
down these conditions; yet they might, I think, all be 
present, and the inspiration not occur. 

Now, if you will apply what is true of our own lives 
to the life of the race in time, you will have a fair 
image of the relation of literature to civilization. The 
great poets, the great ages of poetry, are such selected 
and fortunate moments of the life of the race when 
the power of emotion was roused and released, and es- 
pecially released in those harmonic forms of the rational 



312 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

soul, poetry, art, truth, which are all essentially forms 
of the reason; in these men the flowering of the soul 
takes place in time. The race lives long upon the 
memory of them, measures its own capacity by them, 
and believes that in them, if anywhere, it touches the 
divine pulses of the world. Poetic madness is thus no 
more than the common emotional experience of men in 
a form of higher intensity, and especially characterized 
by the trait that it leaves an artistic product in which 
the emotion is permanently recorded. Furthermore, it 
should be observed that men of genius occupy very often 
a position analogous to the primitive madman who does 
not conform his behavior to the ways of the tribe; the 
poet is by his nature somewhat lawless, especially when 
under the control of his genius ; and he is often regarded, 
therefore, as dangerous, diabolical, denounced as an 
atheist and sent off into the desert, disowned and de- 
famed; in other words, being the announcer of new 
moods and new truths, he is distrusted by men of the 
past and society as already organized in belief and prac- 
tice; genius, in fact, is the principle of variation in so- 
ciety, it is the element in which the new comes to birth; 
and to the old the new always seems a madness because 
it is in contradiction with that past experience which is 
the test of sanity for the bulk of men. Poetic madness, 
then, is characterized not only by the fact that it leaves 
atn artistic product, but also by the fact that this product 
is a new birth in the world. 

Let us consider now, in the light of these conceptions, 
that course of changes in the beliefs and moods of men 
that we commonly denominate progress, of which great 
literatures are the record. You will remember that I 
spoke of great literatures as being in the landscape of 



INSPIRATION 313 

the mind like mountain ranges that mark the emotional 
upheavals of the race; and I have just spoken of them 
again as being the places where the race believes that it 
touches the divine pulses of the world. It is convenient 
to recur to the conception of Lucretius as he expresses 
it in the great invocation with which he begins his poem; 
he addresses the energy of nature and prays that this 
power which brings forth the springtime will inspire his 
mind; inspiration, for him, is this breathing and awaken- 
ing power in his mind, which is one with all power. He 
conceived of man as evolved out of nature without any 
divine intelligence in the process; the eye was not made 
to see nor the ear to hear, but these senses had arisen 
under the conditions existing and had become what they 
could; that was his theory. Man is born in the world 
of nature, and I suppose we shall all agree that man's 
life in nature as he rose through stages of a«imal and 
primitive life was a hard struggle; nature was not al- 
together his friend, and civilization slowly won seems 
to have been won somewhat in spite of nature, and nature 
is still very indifferent to man and his fortunes; man 
exists by making what use he can of the foothold he has 
won in the world of natural law. Man is also born into 
a psychical world; that is, as his body is subject to natural 
law, his mind is subject to another sphere of law, the 
law of mind. Man's faculties have unfolded, we may 
suppose, in the same way as his senses, under the con- 
ditions of the case; they were not created but have 
evolved. Nor is there any reason to believe, so far as 
I can see, that the world of mind is any more friendly 
to man than the world of nature has shown itself to be. 
Certainly the race began by being merged in profound 
ignorance, and in its first steps it was plunged in universal 



314 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

error, especially in respect to what we call higher truth. 
It was long before the errors of the senses — as for 
example that the sun moves round the earth — were 
corrected. In the field of religion the first essays of 
the race were universally what we now call savage super- 
stition, a realm of magic and senseless formulas, of the 
worship of stones and animals, and it was long before 
the conception of immortality itself was other than a 
gloom or a curse; the way upward from the ideas and 
moods of primitive man to such ideas and moods as 
prevail in that small section of mankind which is called 
enlightened was as hard a way as the way of material 
civilization in nature has been. Man has always been 
in peril, and has often suffered. Emotion is one great 
part of psychical life; but it is plain that the history of 
emotion has been as much a record of disaster as the 
history of reason has been a record of error. If you 
read the history of religion and attend to the kind and 
quality and issue of emotion toward the divine, what an 
extraordinary chapter it is of folly and pain and evil! 
It is only slowly that emotion found out tlie useful and 
guiding ways, the illuminating, the humanizing ways 
of its life; just as slowly reason found out its true 
methods in thought. 

Poetry, at its birth, marks the point of victory in 
this career, in this experimentation of emotional energy; 
thereafter it gave the scale of value to emotion. Emo- 
tion had value in proportion as it became such inspira- 
tion as Lucretius prayed for, and passed into the intellect 
and was there discharged in poetry, or music, or sculp- 
ture, or other forms of art, and, in the scientific realm, 
of truth; there it evoked and bodied forth that principle 
of harmony which seems to be the main fact of the psy- 



INSPIRATION 315 

chical world, the world of the perceptions, the world of 
mind. The function of poetry is to qualify the emo- 
tional life of the race as the function of science is to 
qualify its rational life. The test of emotion is its 
capacity to produce poetry, as the test of reason 
is its capacity to produce science. The wasteful and 
destructive emotion, the intoxication and raving, the 
physical exhaustion and death of Dionysus is laid off and 
avoided; the creative emotion issuing in harmonies of 
the mind which we call the life of the spirit — this, the 
inspiration of Apollo, is preferred. The soul has a sure 
instinct in these matters; as a rule, it forgets the past 
rapidly and gladly, but it holds in its memory and clings 
invincibly to the great ages in which this harmony was 
most given out — to poetry which is the most immortal 
of human works, to art in all its culminating periods, to 
Greece as the most fruitful mother of both beauty and 
intellect under the guardianship of the Delphic inspira- 
tion. 

The mood of the world changes. Race differs from 
race, and age from age, in mood as well as in ideas. 
Each race and age creates its own poetry, according to 
its place in civilization and the power of its life. I was 
much struck by the mood of the Mohammedan religion — 
by its sincerity, its dignity, and the fitness of the mood to 
the nature of the people. The bare and quiet mosques 
seemed to me a fitter place for the presence of the 
living god of the desert, the god of boundless nature, 
than any Christian cathedral I ever entered. In a 
Christian church I am apt to feel something of the 
confinement of a tomb, the air of one; the service seems 
a watch for the resurrection. Not only does race differ 
from race, but man from man in the mood of life; the 



3i6 THE INSPIIL\TION OF POETRY 

test of the mood, of its value in the scale of worth, is 
its power to give out the noble dream, body forth a 
poetic form for itself, or if not to create one freshly, to 
find one among those offered by the poets, musicians, 
artists, and prophets of the world. The service of the 
poets is to provide such forms of feeling for mankind. 
The variety of such forms now in the world is great in 
every field of life, in the Bibles of the race, in the battle 
songs of nations, in the love and death songs and the 
faith songs of many ages. The range of value in these 
is from the lowest to the highest; they are higher in pro- 
portion as they contain a more perfect beauty, a more 
pure truth, a more simple harmony of many elements. 

Is the inspiration, then, divine, and do all these forms 
proceed from one infinite power that prompts them? 
Many a poet and many a prophet has so affirmed it of 
his own work — but when Mahomet says that he has 
talked with God, there is a grave shaking of heads. 
It would seem that Jehovah hardly escaped the curse 
he visited upon Babel, but has himself spoken to the 
nations in many tongues. It is not necessary to be too 
well assured. The name of the god adds nothing to the 
truth of the doctrine. The god of poetry is certainly, 
as Tennyson says, the nameless one; the source of in- 
spiration is no more known than the source of the other 
moods by which our being is sustained. It belongs to 
our sense of the infinite in which man feels he vaguely 
shares, that the inspiration is inexhaustible, and con- 
tinually puts forth a new form. The diversity of these 
forms, viewed in their length and compass from the 
beginning and through the world, is one miracle; the 
second and greater miracle is that there is forever, age 
after age, an ever new birth of the hitherto unknown and 



INSPIRATION 317 

unexpected. The mood of the world is forever renewed. 
The poets contain this element of promise; in them is 
the thing that shall be; they are the wings on which the 
new sphere swims into our ken. The infinite energy, 
of which Lucretius sang, has thus its times of putting 
forth in the race, its springtides of fresh abundance, its 
blossoming from age to age, from race to race; there is 
no finality in any of its blossoms; but it never ceases to 
put forth another and another strange and unknown 
flower. 

I have spoken to but little purpose if I have not already 
made it plain that the poetic energy, the emotion and 
the dream, the madness, is common to men and belongs 
to the soul by its own nature. The poetic life is not 
the privilege of some, but the path of all, and the passion 
and the power to lead it is the measure of every man's 
soul. Men may be great in other ways, great in trade 
and politics and war; but they are great in soul in 
proportion as they are poets. Just as in the original 
dancing horde all were poets, so is it still; there may be 
one among them who leads the dance, but all may join 
hands and voices and follow on in unison. The poetic 
impulse is universal; from the emotional urgency of life 
itself no one can escape, but he may avail himself of it 
only for the drunkenness of the senses, for the raving 
physical waste of the untaught, unbridled madness; but 
the man must have, besides the power of emotion which 
nature pours into him, the wise use of this power; and 
if he have wisdom in his soul, he will strive to be inducted 
rather into the choir of Apollo, and behold and share 
in those forms of beauty and truth in which the harmony 
of the world is seen, for these forms of beauty and truth, 
revealed in poetry and shaped in art, are the intellectual 



3i8 THE INSPIRATION OF POETRY 

children of emotion. In their company and gazing upon 
them and habituating his eyes to their presence, he will 
form his own soul after their pattern; for these works 
are so intimately bound with the emotion out of which 
they sprang into being, they are so instinct with its 
immortal vigor, that they generate the same emotion in 
the beholder according as he has power to receive it and 
take its form in his own soul; it is thus that the poets 
are the guardians of the soul. Their office is to nourish 
the poet that is in each one of us, and to free the poetic 
energy in our bosoms in noble forms of our own private 
life; for by commerce with the poets the creative energy 
steals into the breast, and there builds with original force 
in the life that is most inviolably our own and unshared 
by and unknown to the world. The great part of man- 
kind lead this life mostly under the phases of religion, 
whose emotional modes are fixed in forms of dignity, 
beauty and power sanctioned by long use; but in other 
fields the poetic life is neglected, 

I am the more struck, I think, aS I grow older, with 
the sense of how small a part of mankind, and how few 
persons in any generation, really possess the higher fruits 
of civilization; and consequently how frail is man^s hold 
even on the good which he has so hardly won. It is not 
only liberty which can be quickly lost, but every supreme 
blessing. How intermittent and brief the life of the 
arts has been; how rare is a poetic age and how soon 
extinct, if one looks at the general history of the world! 
We are fortunate in the time of our birth, in our in- 
herited poetry, and in the flourishing of reason among 
us; the opportunity for the poetic life is put into our 
hands; all of us, if we will, can acquire that wise use of 
emotion which I have tried to emphasize. For like all 



INSPIRATION 319 

power, emotion is a thing of danger; in the hands of 
the foolish it often destroys them; and the wisest cannot 
better secure himself than by developing his emotions 
through the poets and their kindred. He will, so doing, 
find that emotion is the servant of the highest reason; 
for that principle of harmony which emotion gives out 
and unveils in its finite forms is the element that reason 
takes note of as the eye takes note of light. The true 
opposition is between the infinite and the finite. Emo- 
tion lies in the sphere of the infinite; the infinite is 
inexhaustible, and hence there is no finality in the works 
of genius or in our own lives, as poets and artists are the 
first to confess, for they have no sooner finished their 
work than they are discontented with it and throw it 
aside. You will never seize the poet in his poem, for 
he has already left it; and the poem is only the prophet's 
garment that he leaves behind him in your hands. In- 
spiration resides in the infinite, in emotion. Reason, 
even the creative reason, is of the finite, the measured, 
the known; its works are renewed from the great deep, 
the throbbing of life itself, inexhaustibly; and hence after 
each of the great and glorious toils of genius, each 
emanation of the dream, whether individual or the labor 
of a race, when the last stroke is struck, the last word 
said, and the light begins to die off — then emotion, which 
is of the infinite, again supervenes, still brooding in itself 
some new world, some new gospel of gladder tidings of 
greater joy. 



I 



THE POE CENTENARY 



An address before the Bronx Society of 
Arts and Sciences, New York, January 19, 
1909, on the centenary of the birth of Poe, 



THE POE CENTENARY* 

We are gathered here to do honor to genius. One 
name is on our lips, one memory is in our hearts — that 
of Edgar Allan Poe. Sixty years ago five mourners stood 
round his grave; today in five great cities of the nation, 
and elsewhere, men gather, as we do here, by scores and 
hundreds, to commemorate his birth. It is because 
genius, once born into life, is indestructible; it is safe 
alike from any stroke of earthly fortune and from time's 
attack, it is the immortal vigor of the race. Men do not 
willingly let the memory of it die; men protect its mem- 
ory, and this is singularly true of Poe. No American 
name in literature is, I think, so warmly cherished. It 
is a pleasure, too, to recognize American genius, and 
today it is an added grace that Poe was a child of the 
South. He was, nevertheless, both in his genius and his 
life, remarkably free from locality. It has not been suffi- 
ciently observed hitherto, I think, that more than any 
of his contemporaries Poe occupied a central position in 
his generation; he was better acquainted with the lite- 
rary product of the time, and both by his residence 
and his letters was in touch with a wide area of the 
coimtry. He had lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Phila- 
delphia and New York, and had repeatedly visited New 
England, and his correspondence reached Cincinnati, St. 
Louis, Louisville, Tennessee and Georgia. More than 
the others, he had national range. 

Poe was a Southerner by his breeding; he was an 
American by his career; he was a citizen of the world 

* Copyright, 1910, by The Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. 

323 



324 THE POE CENTENARY 

by his renown. It was a distinguishing trait of his 
personality that when his first tales were hardly dry 
from the press, he was already negotiating for publica- 
tion in England. He always belonged in spirit to the 
larger world. The adventurous sense of it was his 
cadet dream of joining the armies of Poland when he left 
West Point. The literary stamp of it was that in the 
first lines of his criticism, unfledged critic that he was, 
he set up a standard, not that of the leisured hearth of 
Virginia or the newspaper offices of New York or the 
parlor coteries of Boston, but the standard of all the 
world; and though he contracted opportunism, that was 
only the wear and tear of practical life on a fine ideal. 

But it is not enough to be a critic. No critic ever 
had his hundredth birthday celebrated. Poe was from 
his youth an all-round man of letters. One trait which 
peculiarly wins the respect of his fellow craftsmen, I 
think, is that he never was anything else but a man of 
letters. He never earned any money except by his 
pen. He labored twenty years ; for four of these he had 
a salary as an editor, and a dozen times he spoke from 
a platform; otherwise he was an unattached writer and 
lived from day to day. I have no manner of doubt he 
was sincere in saying that in thus adhering to his profes- 
sion he cheerfully bore poverty. His profession pauper- 
ized him. Is it not startling to think that we are 
gathered here, in a city which is the shrine and throne 
of gold, to do honor to a man who was a beggar all his 
days? It is a striking tribute to true values. I make 
no complaint of fate. Literature dedicates her sons 
to the vow of worldly sacrifice. It has been so of old 
time. He was not chosen to be poor more than the 
others were chosen. Hawthorne and Emerson and Poe 



THE POE CENTENARY 325 

' — the three most brilliant men in our literature — all 
led meager lives, but Poe alone was the perfect victim. 
Poe not only lived meagerly; at times he starved. Pov- 
erty is a terrible foe; it is thorough in its work on men 
and nations; it kills. What a victory it is of the spirit 
over its life, of the spirit that makes for immortality 
through all disguises of human wretchedness — that we 
have today in our minds and hearts, out of Poe's meager 
and starved life, poetry, romance, the imagery that fades 
not away! It is true that there is that in it which 
terrifies; here is the legend and superscription of pain 
and death; his music is the requiem of the soul that 
breathed it forth. But his, too, is praise. Poe made 
of his fate his victory; and, for the victim of life, that is 
the master-stroke. We ''bid fair peace be to his sable 
shroud." 

It is fit now, though late, to bring the laurel to him 
who first sent the dark green leaf across the sea to 
Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, and among ourselves 
brought it to Hawthorne and Lowell in their obscure 
years. And he has more to grace his memory — that 
which all men value, the kindly recollection of those 
who were most nigh him. Poe won the laurel and the 
marble; but the mortal flower upon his grave is this — 
that he endeared himself to his friends. He had many 
friends. He had the best. There was no truer gentle- 
man then alive than Kennedy, who to the honor of 
Baltimore befriended his early manhood. There was no 
more kindly colleague than Willis, who gave him his 
hand in New York and never drew it away. There were 
no warmer comrades for mates in life than Thomas, 
Halleck and Burr. Poe had also that power which is 
one of the singularities of genius — the power to let 



326 



THE POE CENTENARY 



the soul shine on all. His office-boy idolized him; 
children suffered him to play with them; and every 
wayfarer who touched his hand or had speech of him 
on his wandering road, seems to have remembered the 
light of that day forever. 

Such are some of the thoughts that rise in me on this 
occasion. I seem to share them with you. These traits 
of fortune and of character to which I have alluded, 
belong to humanity, and link genius to the understanding 
hearts of men; but genius is itself the most revealing 
force of the soul; its manifestations are revelations of 
our nature. The genius of Poe was one of the mani- 
fold forms of humanity; else it were tiot genius; but 
that man who would speak rightly of him must, in 
his vision of human nature, have room and marge enough 
to know that the spirit of life is Infinite in its flowering, 
that the Shepherd of us all has many folds. 



SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 



An address delivered at the celebration of 
the tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare, 
under the auspices of the department of 
English of Brown University, in Sayles Hall, 
April 26, 1916 



SHAKESPEARE 

It is not for any single voice to bear to Shakespeare the 
plaudits of the theater. The mere multiplicity of the 
events of this wide commemoration, the volume of uni- 
versal applause of the generations, force us to realize 
the insignificance of any particular expression of the 
general praise. As in a popular festival, each partici- 
pant, as he passes, follows his own whim in the common 
carnival. The scholar will turn the leaves of his book 
and linger caressingly over recondite difficulties of the 
text or the meaning; the player will fit the costume to 
the mind, and play the part from his bosom. Every- 
thing will go on as in a play. To-day all the world 's a 
stage. For the most part, it is by the eye that Shakes- 
peare's world will be seen, embodied in a fantastic round 
of revels, a general masquerade, a pageant, how varied, 
how familiar, how interminable ! 

Shakespeare's world! 

"Create he can 
Forms more real than living man!" 

Falstaff, Ariel, Titania's Indian Boy! Flow they throng 
the memory as if coming through a hundred-gated 
Thebes! If it is by its transitoriness that we know life, 
it is by its permanence that we know the ideal. There 
is an eternal quality, an everlasting freshness, on the 
intellectual creations of man, analogous to the morning 
luster that still lingers on the Eros, the Apollo, the 

329 



330 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

Hermes, of ancient days. Who of English speech, bred 
to traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in 
his "inky cloak" at a glance? Not to know him would 
argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his 
language. With what a welcome eye we greet the 
Henrys, old John of Gaunt, old York, and how many a 
young prince of brief or long renown! We are able 
to look in Prospero's Magic Book, though buried deeper 
than ever plummet sounded. What a story is recorded 
there, familiar to our sight since our childish eyes first 
fell on some glorious picture of the luminous leaf! What 
is most impressive to me, in a world whose character- 
istic it is to pass away, is the permanence of these ideal 
incarnations of human life in its vital flow and infinite 
variety. It is three hundred years since the Maker of 
Magic passed; yet his figures seem to have left us but 
an hour ago. They combine, as they recede, into a 
Renaissance procession, wreathing along in another age 
than ours; they compose, in the distance, into a true 
triumph of time, with many a medieval and classical 
element of look and gesture; and yet, ere the scene fades, 
it has opened to our eyes, we know, the timeless vision 
of life. 

Two things in this great vision fascinate me: the 
charm of the youths, the wisdom of mature age. It 
is in the earlier plays that I find the spirit of April, 
mounting with each year into a richer and more delicate 
bloom. In Richard II, the tenderest of ill-starred 
princes unfitted for a crown in this tough world, how 
piercing is the poetic appeal! There is weakness in 
his lyrical eloquence, but how it climbs the heavens 
of youth! Biron, on the other hand, is too clever by 
half for a true court, and needs the protection of a love's 



SHAKESPEARE 331 

nunnery to give his wits room and air. In this morn- 
ing mood Shakespeare seems like his own Mercury, 

"New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill," — 

so irresponsibly vital is his gaiety, the mere play of 
his mind in all the ways of beauty and sentiment, of wit 
and laughter, of courage as quick as it is perfect, of 
grace in the action, and of courtesy, which is the grace 
of the mind. No less appealing is the maturer atmos- 
phere of his manlier day: the grave demeanor of Theseus, 
the inviolable peace of Prospero. In these two I find 
touches of an almost Lucretian calm — that quiet, 

"Yearned after by the wisest of the wise, 
Passionless bride, divine tranquillity," 

but never so brought down to earth as in Shakespeare^s 
dream. For to my eyes the great vision, at either limit 
of its range, in its charm of youth, in its wisdom of age, 
wears the aspect of a dream. There Shakespeare's 
poetry, as apart from its dramatic grasp of the passions, 
was at its ripest. The fabric is compact of illusion; yet 
this charm, this wisdom, are compelling in all lands. 
You may sketch the frontiers of civilization by the 
echo of Shakespeare's name. Truth sometimes uses a 
dream as its best medium: such is poetic truth. There 
is an abstract element in poetic truth; it is not for an 
age, but for all time. Truth in Shakespeare — that 
which greatly distinguishes him — is poetic truth. It 
is capacity to express poetic truth that measures a civi- 
lization. To realize life in the abstract as noble or 
beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon 
it — that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the 
chief modern example of this supreme faculty of man- 
kind. 



332 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

Prospero, you remember, is sometimes taken as a 
symbol of creative genius. He declares his might: 

"graves at my command 
Have waked their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth 
By my so potent art." 

The characters, it is true, bear the old names that they 
once bore in history or romance before their waking; but 
when they walk a second time, they are made of a finer 
than earthly substance, they have more than mortal 
speech; they have suffered an ideal change. They are 
creatures seen by the mind's eye. They are no longer 
individuals; a universal element has entered into them, 
wherein if any man look he sees his own face. These 
are not men, but man; it is thence that they are im- 
mortal in literature. The power of evocation, such as 
Prospero describes it, is the most convincing proof of 
genius. Evocation is its royal stamp. So the statue 
slept in marble until Michael Angelo evoked it from the 
block; so music sleeps until it is evoked from the chords; 
so the Virgin's face is evoked from the canvas. The 
vision seems magical at its first creation, whatever be 
the art through whose medium it comes. 

Art, thus, from the beginning of civilization has brought 
new worlds into being. They blaze out like intermittent 
stars and fade away: the divine sphere of Plato's youths, 
the world of Plutarch's men, the thronged region of the 
Renaissance romances whence came Shakespeare's ideal 
women. How many worlds of art there have been! how 
strange it is to fall in with one of them unexpectedly, 
like some lost province of the mind or some far country 
that we know not of! I remember years ago at Naples 
coming upon the Pompeian painting of the ancient time. 



SHAKESPEARE 333 

It was then that the figures of the mythological world 
and the legendary age of Greece first became visible 
images to me — a Theseus, a Jason, a Medea; and the 
Greek past, which had lain in my mind in a sculptural 
form rather than pictorially, took on the romanc of 
color with a certain strangeness in the look of the mer 
— a racial strangeness. It was as if I had wandered 
into a forgotten chamber of the world. Art, in all the 
fields of the imagination, has many of these lost provinces 
in its domain, stretching over the centuries of man's 
various fortunes with the soul. 

There is something foreign to us in any past; but the 
past is known to us, in its spiritual part, only by these 
evocations embodying the passions of life. They are 
not historic; they are ideal. They are not individual; 
they are abstract. They are more or less intelligible 
according to our own understanding powers; but taken 
together, they constitute the true story of man's life. 
As we review the record, even to the "dark backward 
and abysm of time," notwithstanding all strangeness in 
the aspect of the vision under the varying light of time's 
changes, these evocations of art in all its forms are the 
clearest memorial of the soul's life, age after age. It is 
the least encumbered with unconcerning things. It 
writes one truth large on the ruins of time in each great 
age, whatever be the city or the people: this truth — 
that it is the victory in the field of the spirit that decides 
a nation's glory. 

Shakespeare is the chief glory of England. What 
Homer was to the ancient world, Virgil to imperial Rome, 
Dante to medieval Italy, that Shakespeare was to the 
English. His name, as we envisage it, breaks, like a 
constellation, into stars, some major some minor, a clus- 



334 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

ter of world-names now — Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Mac- 
beth, a progeny endless as Banquo's line. Each charac- 
ter clothes himself with a new world — as it were, new 
heavens and a new earth. What noble landscapes! the 
forest of Arden, the Midsummer Wood, the enchanted 
isle, Venice, Verona, Rome! In the art of evocation 
Shakespeare held a master's wand. Scarce any other 
poet seems so facile and so various in creation. It is, 
perhaps, an error of perspective that gives so strong 
a character of multiplicity to his imaginative world. 
The drama has crowded its own stage in every poetic 
land. There was much detail and variety in Virgil, if 
one attends to them, in the changeful flow of the verse. 
Shakespeare seems to us more abundant, too, in part 
because we are native to his world. It was our child- 
hood region. I began to know his work, w^here I like 
to think he first made acquaintance with himself, in the 
Histories. I first saw him, I remember, in that company 
of English Kings, which is one of the bravest panoramas 
of history. Every verse in those great chronicles vi- 
brates with English blood. It was thus as a national 
poet that he first trod the stage. To this day there 
is no such vital history as he wrote, be the scene where 
it may. In him Holinshed and even Plutarch, noble as 
they are in their own speech, leapt to a life above life. 
But it is the Rose of England that he most summons 
from the dust. It is a baptism of patriotism for a boy 
to be nursed on the English plays. Shakespeare was so 
great an Englishman from the first. 



"This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle, 
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi-paradise ; 



SHAKESPEARE 335 

This fortress built by Nature for herself . . . 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . . 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!" 

With what a flow, with what a strength, with what a 
radiance the verse mounts! And in many another pas- 
sage of martial ardor or the victorious cry of arms, one 
hears the living echo of Agincourt still pulsing along that 
far horizon-air. Yet this was but the golden portal of 
Shakespeare's verse. 

The first incarnation of his genius was in history; 
the last incarnation, more powerfully spiritual, was in 
fate. There was an interval when his spirit walked in an 
enchanted pastoral land, sown with wild forest and vistas 
of Italy; and there was an afterworld of poetic romance, 
from which everything except pure reality has been elim- 
inated, which was his farewell to life. In these Come- 
dies of either group there was the glamour of another age 
than ours. In the Histories and Tragedies we encounter 
a reality more distinctly of our world — a reality seen 
with the seriousness of youth in the one, with the 
seriousness of age in the other. What gives to the 
Comedies their tranquil atmosphere, their touch of 
fantasy, their other-worldliness, is the Renaissance, the 
preceding age out of which their characters trooped, 
bringing their landscape with them, together with their 
costume, revels, and speech. The substance of the 
Comedies is the very stuff of the Renaissance in its 
earthly look and mortal feeling. It is a world of acci- 
dents garbed in romance — the world of the Renaissance 
imagination. In the Tragedies, on the other hand, the 
garment of Time is stripped off. The world may be 
Denmark or Scotland; it is indifferent. Cyprus and 
Britain are but names. It is a world of realities, the 



336 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

world of the stark soul. It is true that whatever be 
the sensible garniture of the play, its times, occasions 
and mental modes, the ideas are still the ideas of the 
Renaissance. Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation 
of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the 
Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood 
of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the 
child of that great movement, and marks its height as 
it penetrated the North with civilization. That was his 
world-position. It made him even a greater European 
than he was a great Englishman, and gave him a vaster 
country than his nativity conferred. His genius exceeds 
his age, and is a universal possession; and this is because 
he transcended the accidents of the Renaissance, fair 
and far-spread as they were and much as he employed 
them; and in the great tragedies which seem at times 
supra-mortal, while still using the spell of the ideas that 
the Renaissance gave him, read the fates of men, in a 
imiversal tongue. 

Every great movement, nevertheless, such as we name 
universal, has the limitations of its arc. Our under- 
standing of Shakespeare already depends largely on the 
vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each 
man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; 
but the generations are bound together by the golden 
links of the great tradition of civilization. A writer is 
justly called universal when he is understood within the 
limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a 
country or an age. Seasonal changes, as it were, take 
place in history, when there is practically an almost 
universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of 
life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and 
medieval time, the medieval and the modern. The 



SHAKESPEARE 337 

immense amount of commentary on Shakespeare proves 
the decay of his material, and of his modes of thought 
and expression, quite as much as it illustrates his pro- 
fundity. The Renaissance has long been a past age, and 
now rapidly recedes. Shakespeare's scenic world, at 
least, begins to have the strangeness of aspect which I 
said I first recognized in Pompeian painting. Much in 
the present festivals in his memory — reconstructions of 
his epoch — is antiquarian. He has still his lightning- 
stroke at the moment of fate, his musical eloquence in 
speech, his lovely settings of emotion; but the eye is 
blind that does not see that Shakespeare's imaged world 
is as remote as 

"all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.'' 

Art, I know, by the apparent contemporaneity of its 
masterpieces denies time. Genius has an eternal quality 
in its substance. Beauty has everlastingness. I walk 
through the museum of Athens, by the calm bas-reliefs 
of the farewells of death, with no thought of antiquity. 
I read a knightly romance as if the morning sunlight 
still bathed its green forest and shining armor. The 
violets I find in my books are the same that grow in my 
garden. Life is always a present moment. But when 
art, like Prospero plucking off his magic garment, lays 
aside its apparent contemporaneity — that illusion of 
eternity which is implicit in our consciousness of the 
present moment — it resumes mortality; it contracts 
decay; it disintegrates into history. Shakespeare's art 
suffers the common fate — yet with a difference, with 
an immortal greatness. It grows remote. Strangeness 
creeps into its aspect. But it is equal to its peers, and 



338 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

still looks at us with the imfathomed eyes of Apollo or 
of Oedipus. 

The changelessness of art depends upon the slowness 
of change in man's appreciation of it. That change may 
be as gradual as a summer's day; it may be as abrupt 
as an earthquake rift; but finally it transforms a civiliza- 
tion. Through whatever secular changes, the expression 
in the eyes of life is mystery. Such, too, is the final 
expression in the eyes of art. To me the expression 
seems more and more enigmatic as art recedes. The 
mystery of the fates of men is, I think, best expressed in 
English with poetic truth in the tragedies of Shake- 
speare, as the beauty of life is best displayed in his 
pastoral comedies and kindred plays. However time 
may pluck at them, they still speak a universal language. 
It is true that Shakespeare concentrated the Renaissance 
age, and that was another world than ours; we see it in 
an evening light; but we are its lineal children and its 
language is native to our minds. No greater age ever 
robed humanity in a shining garment. The garment 
may fade, but the soul remembers long its great epochs 
and makes of their master-spirits its sacred guardians; 
for the unseen commonwealth, the true State, is spiritual, 
and has spiritual guardians. 

Art — and I always mean to include in the general 
term the fine art of literature — art, so imderstood, is 
the solvent of the nations. That is how Shakespeare 
came to be a great European. The Renaissance liber- 
ated him from nationality in a provincial sense. He was 
one of the fathers, and is now a chief pillar, of the 
invisible republic of letters, or intellectual State, which 
is the core of modem civilization. Impalpable as any 
ideal commonwealth of old thinkers, this State is a 



SHAKESPEARE 339 

spiritual reality. Shakespeare helped materially to shape 
its present form. The community of scholars in medie- 
val days rested on a universal language, Latin. The 
Renaissance broke the bonds of that great tongue, rich 
with the accumulations of thought and knowledge 
through the centuries of its millennial career; but not 
before a common mold of thought had been established 
in the diverse nations, and mental intercommunication 
between them assured. Latinity receded from the world 
in all forms, especially in language; but art still made a 
universal appeal in so far as it spoke directly to the 
senses in painting and sculpture, architecture and music; 
and though poetic art uses a screen of language and 
approaches the senses through the mind, its creations, 
when they become visible through the screen of lan- 
guage, are found to be woven of the same original stuff 
that the sister arts employ. 

There is this kinship and essential identity in all the 
arts. Shakespeare, indeed, employed his special tongue, 
the English, with a superb touch on its forms of expres- 
sion; but far greater than any linguistic skill was that 
creative might with which, time and again, he modeled 
a world of the universal mind, so compact of loveliness, 
sweetness, or grandeur that the words are but its initial 
harmonies. It is in this world of the mind that he is so 
great a master. Therefore other realms than England 
quickly stripped the screen of language from his work 
and made him European by their diverse tongues as he 
already embodied the intellectual fires and romantic 
horizons of the general age. He contributed powerfully, 
by his sheer inner worth and charm as a poet, to the 
transfusion of national cultures which has long charac- 
terized western civilization, has made its nations intellec- 



340 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

tually hospitable, and has most continued the inheritance 
of that great tradition which poured originally from 
antiquity, and through the Renaissance overspread 
Europ3. It is thus, however slowly, that the world is 
unified. The republic of letters has no frontiers. 

"Greece and her foundations are 
Built below the tides of war." 

It is a spiritual State, and bears in its hands "olives of 
endless peace." 

Shakespeare, through embodying the Renaissance, was 
thus a main force in "humanizing," in the scholarly 
sense, the modern age. By the brilliancy of his genius 
he conciliated nations. This was to serve humanity 
greatly. It should not be forgotten on his anniversary. 
But the effect of Shakespeare historically on world-cur- 
rents is less to us to-day than his elemental magic in 
the ways of genius. Genius is known by its works. 
There it is obvious to all; but who would dare analyze 
its creative light? I only venture the suggestion that 
one characteristic of genius in its works is immediate 
vision — what is sometimes called intuitive vision — 
and that one measure of its force is the intensity of the 
vision. Genius in its creative works does not proceed 
by calculation, by any adaption of means to ends, or by 
any mode of mechanical processes. It uses neither fore- 
sight nor afterthought; its works are made at a single 
cast. That is why I have spoken of its works in the 
arts as "evocations." The summons is instantaneous, 
and instantly obeyed. Genius does not proceed as if 
by mental logic from step to step; it does not reason 
things out; it makes no use of analysis. It sees its 
object as if by revelation, as an image disclosed. It 



SHAKESPEARE 341 

resembles rather, in its operation, the processes of vital 
growth. However long may be the unconscious prepa- 
ration of nature, the plant blossoms in a night — a single 
unguessed and exquisite bloom. The vision of genius 
comes as a whole and instantaneous, as a face floats into 
the air of memory. 

There is this immediacy in the creations of art as they 
arise in the mind. So little are they foreseen that they 
are always a surprise. So little are they planned that 
they often puzzle their own creator to interpret them. 
So little are they indebted to ordinary reason that 
poets have always called them ^'inspirations." They 
do not spring from observation, however long or 
profound. Never do they repeat any experience of the 
actual. They are free from the world of nature. These 
creations have a world of their own — a mental world. 
Shakespeare's visible world is in "the mind's eye." The 
mental world is a true world, like nature; but it contains 
greater reality. Balzac used to say, turning from his 
callers to his books — "Now for real people." A uni- 
versal element enters into the mental world. It is the 
sphere of poetic truth, Shakespeare's world. It was the 
place of his vision of life. Nothing of Hamlet, Lear, 
Othello, Macbeth, was ever actual in experience; nothing 
such as their fatal histories was ever observed. The truth 
their souls contain is purely mental; it is poetic truth. 
Shakespeare presents truth in a vision of that world 
which exists only in "the mind's eye." Yet who does 
not perceive that his world is more "real than living 
man," and unveils the fates of men with a revealing 
range and search beyond nature? It is here that genius 
inhabits and creates. 

In this poetic world Shakespeare, as he matured, de- 



342 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

veloped in his genius a penetration and intensity that 
seem not only beyond nature, but at times beyond mor- 
tal power. It is in the four great tragedies that he most 
impresses us so. Tragedy is for youth. Nature draws 
a film over the eyes of youth which tempers the sight to 
that fierce light; but for older eyes, 

"Grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars," 

it is too strong a ray. Even in youth one sometimes 
lays down the book. The mind turns from the four 
tragedies to the earlier "moonlight and music and feel- 
ing'^ of the charmed meadows and woods and cities of 
the pastoral plays and their kin, much as Tennyson 
turned from Milton's angel hosts to delights of Paradise: 

"Me rather all that bowery loneliness, 
And brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, 
And bloom profuse and cedar arches 
Charm." 

So, too, one turns from the "Inferno" of Dante to the 
sweetness and glory of the "Paradiso." The genius of the 
tragedies is, indeed, more transcendent; but there is 
greater fascination in beauty than in terror. It may 
be noticed that the tragedies are full of vision, not doc- 
trine. No judgment is passed on what is revealed. It 
is as if the poet said, "Look, and pass." This is what I 
have called the world of the stark soul. At times it 
scarcely suffers words. The pastoral comedies, on the 
other hand, are garmented with lovely phrase. They 
are not free from melancholy shades, as at the close of 
"Love's Labor's Lost." "The scene begins to cloud," 
says Biron, but it is only with natural grief. For the 
most part the tragic lot of man is in the background, if 
it intrude at all. We know the sadness of Antonio, in 



SHAKESPEARE 343 

the "Merchant of Venice," but not what secrets of mor- 
tality it concealed. 

In the pastoral comedies, as I somewhat inaptly term 
them from their sentiment rather than from their land- 
scape, we are in the old, almost antique world of romance. 
Romanticism had its nest in Greece. We feel its nativity 
in such a play as "Pericles." The chance adventures of 
travel, the outlandish regions, the surprising incidents, 
the shipwrecks, the general sense of a roving world — 
in brief, a thousand details of composition — remind 
us how recently the drama had emerged from chaos of 
romantic fiction. The world of Shakespeare is full of 
this variety in detail, like a book of the Italian Renais- 
sance, and with the variety there blended an omnipresent 
strangeness equally characterizing that age of which the 
very breath was mental discovery. The human spirit 
was like an immigrant in a new country: anything might 
happen there. The tradition of the past is felt in Shake- 
speare's story, both in its materials and its methods of 
narration; but it is a past whose breath of life was ro- 
mance, and awoke in Shakespeare's mind as in a world 
about to be born. Shakespeare was great as an English- 
man; he was greater as an emanation of the Renaissance 
which he drew into himself; but, greatest of all, he was 
the blazing star of romanticism, when its unearthly beauty 
took possession of the European world. 

It is characteristic of genius when it is greatest, to 
include a broad arc of man's progress in its own career. 
Thus practically an entire cycle of romantic art may 
be observed in Shakespeare's drama. It began in archa- 
ism! it ended in a climax of perfection. It is multiple 
and composite, characterized by an incessant change 
of theme and heterogeneity of material. It has the mis- 



344 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

cellaneousness as well as the large horizons of the Eliza- 
bethan mind. It is a drama as romantic in method as 
in subject. Exuberance is the quality of the creative 
genius that produced it, and infinite variety marks its 
works. His genius is ever companioned by a wandering 
spirit. Consider the many disguises in which he uses the 
device of the episode, as, for instance, the play within 
the play, the introduced dance or masque, the tale, the 
soliloquy, or more subtly in the brief idyllic passages that 
are for poetry what "purple patches" are for rhetoric. 
Yet, however far or often genius may accompany this 
wandering elf, it keeps within the magic limit which 
holds all in true unity. This romantic surface, like a 
phosphorescence playing over the dramas, is an incessant 
and growing phenomenon of Shakespeare's art. Not less 
obvious is the unity of feeling in them — what is some- 
times called "keeping" — which is an essential part of 
romantic unity, and which operates with such force in 
Shakespeare as to place each of his plays in a world of 
its own. 

The singularity of his genius is that while expressing 
itself so admirably that at each new disclosure it seems 
to have arrived at perfection in its kind, it grows 
nobler, grander, or sweeter at each new creation. It 
belongs to most of us to seize on some single aspect of 
art, and to cleave to it. Taste, by a reversion of type, 
may recur to the archaic and primitive, especially under 
the impulse of a preference for simplicity. It may, at 
least, without going to such lengths, require that there 
be only few elements in high beauty — a single bloom in 
an isolated vase, or, as the custom now often is in mu- 
seums, one supreme statue in a room dedicated to it. 
Taste, such as this, finds romantic art too distracting 



SHAKESPEARE 345 

in theme, too overwhelming in feeling. The tragedies 
and later romances have too much depth of thought, 
too much richness of decoration, too much mystery 
(whether of terror or beauty), for minds of such a 
caliber. At most they find pleasure in the golden come- 
dies that sprang to light before Shakespeare's genius 
reached its climax of power. 

These comedies, which for many are the center of 
delight, if not of worship, in Shakespeare's work, have a 
smoothness and softness of execution and effect, some- 
what Victorian in the quality of their art, if I may ven- 
ture to say so, somewhat Tennysonian in exquisiteness 
of impression: not that Shakespeare resembles Tenny- 
son in style, but there is a kinship of genius between 
them at that stage of Shakespeare. This period of 
smoothness and softness in art marks a point of per- 
fection which lasts but a moment. Art roughens again, 
in mood and act, as it bends to the new age. There is 
a Michael Angelo for a Rafael then; or the Pergamon 
marbles replace the Parthenon. It may be for better 
or for worse, but the new age will have its way. The 
peculiarity in Shakespeare's case is that he himself 
brought in the new age, with the tragedies and the last 
romances. Though Webster and Ford followed him, 
he had already struck the hour. The cycle of romantic 
art in the drama was complete, though there might be 
a long after-play of its fires. 

Shakespeare not only embodied the spirit of romantic 
art in his own age; he heralded a greater movement 
in time. Art has a double visage: it looks before and 
after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ 
of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other 
hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been 



346 SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 

gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; 
economizes the energy of genius. Formalism supports 
feebler spirits, directs, and restrains. Formahsm is a 
backward looking mode, and archaic with respect to its 
own time. Romance plows in the field of the future 
as in an eternal spring. It is true that the reaction from 
Shakespeare's art was extreme in England. An intellec- 
tual, rather than a poetic, age succeeded. But when the 
earth began to expand again with an April season of the 
world, how the seed of romanticism sprang everywhere, 
like grass, as if it were life's natural verdure! Romantic 
art did not then, indeed, put forth one all-embracing 
genius, like Shakespeare; it required a Byron, a Tenny- 
son, and a Browning to complete the cycle in our age 
just past; but the voice of the modern triad is that of 
romance once more a-wing for a supreme flight. The 
Renaissance found a new birth in Keats and Shelley 
and many another; and though romanticism, spreading 
through a wide circle of art and thought, seems less 
exclusively, less predominantly literary, in that age of 
the nineteenth century, it gave breath to a whole spiritual 
movement. Its leaders were not more indebted to Shake- 
speare than to the other great spiritual guardians, as I 
have called them, of the international State that exists 
invisibly at the core of modern civilization; but they are 
indebted to him, as one of those guardians, there sitting 
with his peers. 

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than 
anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts 
thought in his eulogy. "The myriad-minded one" is 
his best designation. Wliolly apart, however, from his 
extraordinary mental inclusiveness, the comprehensive 
grasp and intuitive penetration of his visionary genius, 



SHAKESPEARE 347 

such that he seemed to create worlds of being like 
separate stars — and apart also from the substance of 
wisdom which the dramas contained, he was especially 
wonderful, let me add, as a man of letters merely — that 
is, as a man accustomed to express ideas in written words. 
An excess of linguistic power over language, equally with 
an excess of metrical power over verse, characterized the 
latest plays. A marvelous power of expression over 
language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in 
his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language 
as of the bonds of meter. But he was something more 
and other than literary. He was a wonderful example 
of the human spirit, and in his creative power affects 
one with a sense of the inexplicable, like a natural 
force. Above all, he was intensely human in his spiritu- 
ality; that is why he is so often thought unspiritual. 
Hence he gathers the world under the spell of his genius. 
It is thus that he is beheld at last as an arch-leader in 
the world of the spirit of man — one of those few who, 
however distant in country or epoch, are, after centuries, 
the true "sons of memory." 

I have set forth Shakespeare, you perceive, immortal 
as he is, in the light of an historic world lapsing now into 
the shadows of time. I remember once, when I was 
sailing over the Aegean Sea northward from Athens, I 
saw what was afterward for me a long-recollected scene. 
Naturally my eyes were fastened on the Parthenon, visible 
from afar. Shores and promontories slowly became ob- 
scure in the growing distance. At last nothing remained 
except the temple seen against the setting sun. Every 
touch of earth had departed from it — a vision as it were 
in the golden west. I thought how some young Ionian, 
approaching, thus saw it under the dawn, ages since, 



348 



SHAKESPEARE, AN ADDRESS 



with the glint on Athene's lifted spear — first a gleam, 
then the temple, then the ''darling city." I saw it in 
my departure, garmented with light, a ruin alone in the 
sun. I was to me then the symbol of antique beauty. 
It is so that I see Shakespeare's world in the light of a 
receding age. 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 



An address before the Salem Athenaeum 
at the formal opening of Plummet Hall, 
October 2, 1907 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

Mr. President: 

I am accustomed to say that Essex County is the 
most blessed spot on the earth's surface, for ordi- 
nary human life. If I am pressed for some explanation, 
I own that possibly filial affection enters into my judg- 
ment, but that it seems to me that material comfort 
is more widely distributed here than elsewhere through 
the whole population, and especially that it is the best 
place to bring up a boy in. It is not the wealthiest of 
communities; it is not the most intellectual; it is the 
home neither of art nor manners. In these respects 
New York, Paris and Italy surpass it. It is not the most 
beautiful in scenery nor the most suave in atmosphere. 
I should hesitate to say that it is the most civilized. 
The marks of civilization are hard to name. Commonly 
each nation or era points to its own characteristic 
achievement as the mark of civilization: Tyre to its 
wealth, Athens to letters and the arts, Rome and Eng- 
land to government. But wealth has flourished in all 
civilizations, whether as flocks and herds, hoards of 
jewels and coins, trade privilege, stock-certificates, with- 
out much changing its character in any age or environ- 
ment; letters and arts appear and disappear like the 
cities they illuminate and adorn; spiritual lives have 
been lived in the midst of revolting conditions of blood, 
brutality and ignorance in many lands and times, capital 
inventions were made ages ago in China, and the most 

351 



352 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

vaunted of modern inventions hardly equals in dignity 
and power that old invention of the alphabet. It is 
truly hard to say in what civilization consists, if one 
looks at the long career of men justly. Yet, obeying the 
universal influence which guides men's thoughts on this 
matter along the lines of their own efforts, in this epoch 
of democracy it has seemed to me that one mark of ad- 
vancing civilization now is the degree to which we suc- 
ceed in obviating the natural or artificial inequalities 
in the condition of men at large; or, in a word, one meas- 
ure of our own civilization is our power to approach 
social justice. It is no part of my own dream to divide 
equally the material goods of men; but, a free career 
being left to personal initiative and its rewards, it does 
seem to me that such a portion of material wealth in 
the community should be set aside as to secure to all 
citizens equal ownership in and benefit from the great 
fruits of civilization, which should be national and not 
personal possessions. I mean, for example, a public 
right to the benefits of science, as instanced in medi- 
cine or engineering and illustrated by public hospitals 
and water-supply; or to the benefits of elementary or 
higher knowledge as illustrated in public schools and 
colleges; or to the benefits of art as illustrated in muse- 
ums, parks, monuments, and all that adorns a city and 
softens the life of its people. That is a fortunate city 
in which the universal human wants are rationally met 
or alleviated by public means, so that its citizens feel 
an equal ownership, not in the material accumulation 
of wealth, but in the accumulation of civilizing power 
in the community to better the condition of men — to 
secure health, intelligence, enjoyment, relief, opportunity, 
within the limits of what life allows. Such a community 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 353 

puts in the breast of every man born into it the most 
precious of all human possessions — hope. I wish that 
the mark of citizenship were less exclusively thought of 
as the right to vote, and thereby share in government, 
which (as we all know) is often a very illusory thing; 
but rather as the right to share in the common good, 
secured by public wealth — the good of education, health, 
recreation, the many forms of public property and ex- 
penditure, of which the fruition is diffused through every 
home like daily dividends. There is little need to expand 
upon a theme which, more or less clearly understood, 
is the ideal of all of us, and one that we inherit; but I 
desire to make plain why it is that I merely hesitated to 
describe our county as, in the line of our efforts, an 
uncommonly civilized spot. Surely there are few places 
on the earth^s surface so democratically peopled, in the 
best sense; few, where under the operation of rightful 
taxation and private beneficence the public wealth has 
brought the goods of modern life, the fruits of progress, 
so within reach of whosoever will to take them and home 
to every door; few where the accumulated civilizing power 
of the community is a possession held in common. 
This city is excellently supplied by its public institutions 
and otherwise with the means of storing and communi- 
cating this wealth; and it is especially distinguished by 
the little group of institutions of the scientific and liter- 
ary life, seldom found so happily united — the Athenaeum, 
the Essex Institute, the East India Marine Society, and 
the Peabody Academy, which have grown up together, 
and, as it were, in the same shell. They are the crown 
of the city, and stand to it in the place of a University, 
and one of the best kind, one not founded, but native 
to the city, growing out of its own past, body of its body, 



354 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

and soul of its own soul. It is a remarkable and in- 
structive phenomenon in American culture. 

What is most useful to observe is that our democracy, 
our socialism, our use of the public wealth for the com- 
mon good as a matter of just right, is not a brand-new 
thing, something theoretic and reformatory; but is our 
tradition from the past; it is home-sprung and home-bred. 
These various societies are rooted in old days. To in- 
quire into their history is like excavating ancient cities; 
under each we find a predecessor, sometimes more than 
one. You are familiar with the origins of the Athe- 
naeum, and I shall only touch upon them to illustrate 
other matters. It is proper to recall the great name of 
Franklin, whose luminous genius was the ruling star 
of the second age of the colonies, when, in the growth 
of its secular and commercial life, the lines of the nation 
began to be molded. Various as were his works, and 
marvelous as was his forecasting wisdom, it is doubtful, 
in view of the results, whether any of his minor plans 
gathered such increase of power, as it grew, as did his 
founding of the subscription Social Library in Phila- 
delphia, which may fairly be looked on as the father of 
the public libraries of the United States. The principle 
of associated effort was dear to him, and in this case it 
was put to great uses. The Salem Social Library was 
founded in 1760, and was the third in the country. It 
is true that this was a full generation after Franklin, but 
things moved slowly in those days. The point of interest 
is that here was the first place in Massachusetts where 
Franklin's idea germinated. A still greater distinction, 
as it seems to me, belongs to the second of the two libra- 
ries that underlay the Athenaeum, that called the Phil- 
osophical Library, which was at that time, I suppose. 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 355 

unique in the country, and whose influence was one of 
the springs of the scientific studies that have distin- 
guished this city. It was, as you all know, a prize of 
war; but I do not find in your records any precise ac- 
count of its capture. 

It was on the homeward voyage from Bilboa that the 
ship 'Tilgrim," Captain Joseph Robinson commanding, 
hailing from Beverly, after a successful privateering 
cruise, fell in, on January 5, 1781, with the British ship, 
"Mars." The opponents were not unevenly matched. 
The "Pilgrim" was of two hundred tons burden, and car- 
ried sixteen nine-pound cannon and a crew of one hun- 
dred and forty men; the "Mars" was frigate-built, four 
hundred and fifty tons mounting twenty-four carriage 
guns, and manned by a crew of one hundred men. The 
combat lasted over three hours, and is described as one 
of the most severe and desperate sea-fights of the Revo- 
lution; at the end, both ships being much shattered and 
disabled and the "Mars" having lost her captain and five 
men killed, with eighteen wounded, victory rested with 
the Americans. The "Pilgrim" reached Beverly, Febru- 
ary 9, and was followed by her prize on the 13th. The 
ship and cargo, having been duly condemned, were adver- 
tised for sale April 1 1 ; but owing to a severe storm the 
auction was postponed until April 17. It was at this 
sale that, with the friendly co-operation of Andrew and 
John Cabot, owners, the philosophical library belonging 
to Dr. Richard Kirwan of Dublin, was sold for a small 
sum to the group of gentlemen and scholars, inspired 
by the Rev. Joseph Willard of Beverly, who formed 
themselves into a small association for its common use. 
It was kept in the minister's house near the Common, in 
a room which was in my boyhood still known as "Mr. 



356 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

Willard^s study," and where — and the memory makes 
me feel less a stranger here — I used often to play as a 
child. It was a remarkable body of men who gathered 
in that room to form the association. We are apt to 
think of those old elders as only less forbidding in their 
lives and persons than in their portraits, and doubtless 
they were very solemn folk; but by the time of the 
Revolution other ranks of life had mixed with the old 
clergy, and what strikes us in this particular gathering 
was the infusion of learning and science in the circle. 
It was less a clerical than a scholarly group; and it is 
surprising to find on the obscure lane of a small colonial 
town, such as Beverly then was, a group of seven men 
gathered in the hard times of the Revolution to advance 
the cause of science in its higher forms, and to use the 
opportunity that the chance of war had cast their way 
to prosper the great works of peace. It is remarkable, 
too, to find such distinction in the group. Joseph Wil- 
lard, the mover of the enterprise, was afterward the first 
president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 
and also president of Harvard College; Joshua Fisher, 
also of Beverly, was the first president of the Massa- 
chusetts Medical Society; Manassah Cutler, of Ipswich, 
besides other claims to distinction, was the founder of 
the State of Ohio. The remaining four, Barnard, Prince, 
Holyoke and Orne, of this city, are too well known in 
its traditions to require any reminder here of their honor- 
able careers. This little club of learned men, with addi- 
tions from time to time of other eminent names, con- 
tinued the library and finally handed it on to the Athe- 
naeum. At the conclusion of the war they offered an 
indemnity to the original owner, Dr. Kirwan, who de- 
clined it with an expression of his happiness in finding 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 357 

that his library had met with such good fortune and 
served so excellent a use. To me this little story of how 
the scientific library reached our coasts is a very pic- 
turesque incident of the Revolution; the gallant sea- 
fight, the circle in Mr. Willard's study, the offer of rec- 
ompense make up a complete and romantic tale; it 
carries off the honors of both war and peace. 

I will not enter further into details of the history 
of the Athenaeum. They are well known to you; but 
on such an occasion as this it is proper, and belongs to 
filial piety, to refresh our minds with the remembrance 
of our debt to the past and to recall its character. The 
library thus founded on the one hand after the example 
of Franklin and on the other by the ardor for science, 
with additions made by a new subscription, became 
nearly a century ago the Athenaeum. It may truly be 
described as one of the earliest hearths of culture in 
our country; and its destiny was worthy of its origins. 
It is a great distinction for this library that it sheltered 
in their youth two of the first-born men of genius in this 
country — one, foremost in science, and one foremost in 
literature. Here Nathaniel Bowditch found at once the 
broad horizons of science, and learned its dignity, its 
compass and methods in the most effective way in which 
they can appeal to the imagination and apprehension of 
youth, by the mere sight of great monuments of its 
literature in books ; here he made his mind exact, search- 
ing and practical, and informed with true learning. He 
was aware of his debt, the modes of which are easily 
seen, and he remembered it throughout his life, and at 
his death by a grateful bequest. Here Hawthorne, in 
the bitter years of his solitude found society, and in his 
poverty the riches that neither moth nor rust corrupt 



358 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

and that pass not away. If the modes of his debt are 
less plain in his works, that belongs to the secret of 
the alchemy of genius which is wonderful in its processes 
and transformations. He must have begun to read here 
shortly after his return from college, if not earlier, for 
his family had a connection with the library. One of 
his name was a founder of the Athenaeum; his aunt, Mary 
Manning, had a share in 1827, and the next year trans- 
fered it to him, and he remained a proprietor until Feb- 
ruary 21, 1839, when he removed to Boston; and during 
his second residence in Salem he again became a proprie- 
tor for nearly three years, from January 6, 1848, to 
November 29, 1850, when with the winning of his fame 
he left his native town to be the citizen of his country 
forever. The lists of his borrowings from the library 
are still in existence, and have been printed; but the 
closest scrutiny shows little direct obligation in his tales 
and romances to the books he read. He was a discursive 
reader, and read — it seems to me — mostly to store his 
mind with travel, history, literature. His genius is 
singularly original, a brooding mind such as would natu- 
rally spring from his sea-ancestry; heredity underlay his 
imagination; but the intellectual store that supported it, 
all that one draws from books, was given by this library. 
Yet were it only solace that he derived from his reading 
here, it was a great honor to this library to have afforded 
it to so solitary and unbefriended a genius through the 
years of his trial. The memory of Hawthorne's presence 
here is that which will longest abide. 

There is a twofold moral which so naturally flows from 
the history of the Athenaeum that — though I had no 
thought of bringing you counsel — yet I will not forbear 
to draw. After all, too, this little group of Salem insti- 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 359 

tutions is not only the crown of the city, but honors the 
whole county; here its history is stored, its ideals illus- 
trated and its fame most borne through the world. The 
first part of the moral is that this library is by its own 
traditions dedicated, as it were, to science and literature. 
It was agreed when the Athenaeum took over the Phil- 
osophical Library that it would continue to subscribe to 
the great sets of publications; and this was done. The 
city has certainly owed something of its scientific repute 
in later days, to the presence of these books and to their 
example. It would seem the mere fulfillment of its ro- 
mantic birth that here in this library there should always 
be a body of sound science in its highest forms. In a 
similar way it would seem natural that Hawthorne's 
library should aiways hold the established literature of 
the world. I was struck in reading over the titles of the 
catalogue of 1858 with the excellence of the collection. 
I trust that in the last half century the same standard 
has been maintained. It might be thought that the duty 
I indicate should be devolved on the Public Library, 
since that, too, has been happily established in the city; 
but a Public Library is necessarily bound to a popular 
expenditure of its money. This little group of institu- 
tions, to which I have so often referred, offers an un- 
usual opportunity; it naturally suggests co-operation 
and the further development of that associated effort 
which Franklin wisely advised. In many Italian cities, 
no larger if so large as Salem, there have long been 
academies, which have bred scholars of distinction and 
have advanced knowledge of all kinds; if the Athenaeum 
were developed along the lines of its original design, 
it might well be a powerful support of such associations. 
The idea, however, may even take a larger scope. You 



36o THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

have, doubtless, observed that of late the university 
in this country tends to become, what it was of old in 
Italy and Europe generally, a municipal institution. 
New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, 
to name no others, have universities which are, ex- 
plicitly or practically, city institutions. Buffalo is now 
considering the establishment of such a university. Our 
neighborhood to Harvard, and other similar institutions, 
precludes the necessity for such action here; but it is 
plain that the group of institutions here might stand in 
the place of much of the office of a university for the 
city, with growth of time and an intelligent co-operation 
among them. Public bequests are useful; but often 
those who devise means of extending their usefulness, 
of bringing what I have called the public wealth, meant, 
however limited, for communal purposes, into contact 
with the people — those who devise means of extract- 
ing the greatest possible utility out of such donations, 
are hardly less to be thanked than the original donors, 
as they are hardly less serviceable. The diffusion of 
these riches is as important as their accumulation. I be- 
gan by saying that the scientific and literary institutions of 
the city were to it in the place of a university, and so in 
their measure they have proved; but having regard to 
the future and keeping in mind the example here early 
set of preparing the way on a high scale of hope and 
purpose, it is becoming to the place and the occasion 
tonight to hope that science and literature may here for- 
ever find a peculiar home and be generously stored for 
the higher uses of the city's intellectual life as that is 
fed from many kindred streams. 

I was glad to observe in the collection a considerable 
proportion of foreign books, whose presence, I suppose, 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 361 

was partly due to the bequest of Miss Susan Burley 
specially set apart for literature in foreign languages. 
It was an enlightened policy that was thus followed. 
It is singularly provincial to look on literature as limited 
to English, and much more so if the whole field of 
knowledge be included. It is as if one should be content 
to know English history only and nothing of the conti- 
nent; for English literature itself is as much intertwined 
with other literatures as English history is with the 
history of the world. The times of narrow horizons have 
gone by; they are out-of-date as much as the stage- 
coach; the whole world has been widely thrown open in 
the last age, and is now accessible from end to end, and 
is greatly growing into one broad dominion of man's 
mind and heart. It is necessary to have on our shelves 
the knowledge and life of nations and races that every 
day grow more nigh to us than the sister states were 
when this library was founded. I was interested to learn 
in Buffalo last spring that the Public Library there 
circulates hundreds of Polish books. Even our little 
library in Beverly has French and Italian volumes. In 
such a library as this, one might well hope to find, in 
time, the entire standard literature of the European 
world. It is not so very large a body, numbered in 
volumes. It is obvious that this collection, that I indi- 
cate as the core of an endowed and privileged library 
like this — a collection of the best of the world's science 
and literature — would be mainly for a select class of 
minds; and this might be thought an objection. The 
objection, however, merely serves to bring out more 
forcibly the second part of the moral which I said natu- 
rally flows from the history of the Athenaeum. It has 
in the past fed two such minds, Bowditch and Haw- 



362 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

thorne; and this was perhaps, in the balances of the 
world, its most important service. It is said sometimes 
that the best school is that which best educates the best- 
endowed boy in it. My own deep belief in individuality 
and the immeasurable value of personal genius to the 
world might not lead me to adopt so extreme a view in 
practice; but I am quite sure that such a library as 
this, with its happy experience, may well see to it that 
its collection shall feed the highest class of minds that 
approach it in youth or ripen in it in manhood, and may 
even consider this as almost its hereditary privilege. It 
is equally necessary in the ideal city to provide for the 
best and for the humblest. It belongs to the Public 
Library primarily to provide for the latter, and for such 
a library as this to provide for the former. I have 
observed abroad that it is easy in cloistered institutions 
to be content with the riches of the past, and to regard 
them as dusty heirlooms, with proud indolence. It is 
rather for us to lead the lives our fathers led. 

Having ventured so far in sketching the lines of a 
noble city watching over the life of her citizens, I am 
emboldened to add a few words more upon a related 
matter, which like many things dear to my heart, I can 
serve only by occasionally speaking of as I may have 
opportunity. I am particularly led to it by another 
trivial childish memory, associated in my mind with the 
Athenaeum. You may remember there used to stand 
in the yard, not far from the old Athenaeum building, 
some images. Now the sight of those images was my 
first vision of the world of art. I used to walk over from 
Beverly in my boyhood to look at them, gazing (as it 
seems to me now) through a fence that I was not tall 
enough to look over. It is, as I say, a trivial memory; 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 363 

but it helped me afterwards to understand why Mr. 
Henry James, describing Hawthorne looking over with 
some friends the designs of Flaxman here in Salem, 
spoke of the incident as "pathetic." The thirst of a 
child for beauty is always pathetic. I remember an 
acquaintance telling me once, many years ago, of a 
London child in the street saying to him, as the boy 
looked wonderingly at the roses he carried, "How rich 
you are!" I have wondered often on what crumbs and 
herbs of the fields Italian children and Bedouin boys 
can physically survive; but it is almost as surprising to 
think on what thin fare a New England boy, with a 
touch of imagination, hung to the life of art in those 
old days. I was the more struck, on this account, when 
a few years ago I visited the Exeter Academy, and was 
amazed at the beauty of its halls and rooms; it seemed 
an intellectual home -- a home for the mind — filled as 
it was with casts, great views and various ornaments. 
It opened the world of the present and past to the eye; 
the Greek room was a bodily entrance to a new world; 
and I am quite sure that many a well-bred boy, when he 
first passes those doors, feels that he has come to a new 
and greater Hfe, to a place where the life of the human 
mind is visible in its noble history. I remembered the 
grimness of my own Exeter days. Last year in Brusa, 
in Asia Minor, I visited, one rainy day, a mosque, where 
for many years there had been an old-established school, 
and was allowed, when I explained that I, too, was a 
teacher, to go to the boys' rooms. I climbed great flights 
of stone steps without any guard-rails, through what 
seemed desolate and neglected surroundings, to the roof, 
where the two bovs, fifteen or sixteen years old, who were 
my temporary hosts, showed me the line of little rooms 



364 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

running in an outside circle round the mosque, the inte- 
rior of which could be seen through apertures on the 
other side. They took me to their room; a small, cell- 
like place, with the straw mat on which, as an infidel, 
I could not step, a low table hardly raised from the floor, 
with an inkstand, a few worn books, and materials for 
making coffee, a pallet on the floor — that was all, except 
the little window framing in the most beautiful of May 
landscapes and looking miles away over the fair country 
— such a landscape view as we associate with Italian 
monasteries. It was not so unlike my own Exeter days, 
except that we had no landscape. There was great 
charm in it, with the boys interested in my interest, 
standing by; but it was a charm of old days, of foreign 
things, of life long past lived in strange ways in the 
mosque. I have made a long anecdote of it, but my 
mind lingers happily on the scene. Now, if you will 
pardon me, it seems to me that, rich as the city is in 
the means of the intellectual life, if it be lacking in 
anything, it is in the opportunity to satisfy the thirst 
for beauty and to open the mind out in art. I dare say 
your school-houses are supplied with objects such as 
make Exeter beautiful for a boy to grow up in, but I 
cannot think they are so rich in such things as I could 
wish. There should be casts of sculpture and bronze 
which give to physical beauty its soul, which add to 
bodily perfection radiance and wings as it were, and teach 
the boy's eye that perfection is not of the body after 
all, but of what lives in it and looks from it, and is both 
incarnated and released by it in its beauty. There 
should be views of the great cities and squares of the 
world, like the colored prints of Venice, which shall open 
the greatness and romance of the world to the boy, and 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 365 

there should be portraits of heroic figures and pictures 
of historic action ; and these should be, not like oasis spots 
flung on a desert of wall, as I have sometimes seen them, 
but abundant, and arranged with home-like refinement, 
so that these rooms and building shall be, as I have said, 
homes for the minds of the children and youth, and 
homes that prepare them for the greatness of the world 
and of man's life. In the old days of the India trade, 
what romance there was in these communities; every 
home knew the sound of magical Eastern names; no 
closet or chest could open but what Sabsean odors came 
forth on the air; there were ivories, sandal- wood and 
curious and delicate carvings; a thousand things, to stir 
the imagination, to give the sense of the distant, the 
strange, the adventurous — the feeling of a world of 
men. This effect can still be gained by the use of such 
means as I have described. The value of it is worth 
at least an added year to the curriculum; and more than 
that, for it feeds what nothing else can feed — what 
starves. For having been much in colleges and near to 
education I must bear my hard testimony — the brain 
thrives and the head; but the soul dies. My creed is a 
brief one; but I do completely believe in Plato's doctrine 
that the sight and presence of beauty shapes the soul 
in childhood and youth, in beautiful forms. If there 
cannot be a great museum of art here, it is easy, and to 
my mind it is practically a better thing, to adorn the 
schools freely with the admirable reproductions of art 
which are to be had; and I believe that such a policy 
commonly adopted through the county would be a civi- 
lizing power among the very first for efficiency in the 
life of our youth. 

It is obvious that in the wandering and natural re- 



366 THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 

flections which this occasion has brought to my mind — 
and which are meant less as a formal address than as 
a neighborly talk — what has emerged more and more 
is the ideal of the noble city, which has gradually clari- 
fied itself in my phrases as I have spoken. Yet it does 
not seem to me that anything in that ideal is the con- 
scious work of my own thought or will; its features have 
come forth as the statue from the native rock; it is an 
ancestral face, the hope of the fathers, the issue and the 
heir of their toils. Looking back, we have seen in the 
history of this institution their humble but wise begin- 
nings for a larger and communal intellectual life; the 
sea-fortune wisely availed of to lift the ideal of what 
was possible in a pioneer land ; the molding of the genius 
of the sons of the city; and generation after generation 
caring for and enriching the trust left to their charge. 
One should specially mention Caroline Plummer in hon- 
orable remembrance tonight, who gave a home to this 
library, and housed with it the kindred societies under 
one roof. Now a new change has come, and the Athe- 
naeum formally opens its own peculiar home. It is a 
time for congratulation; but I should not be a New 
Englander, if I did not add that it is also a time to 
remember that the penalty of success is more work, the 
penalty of privilege is duty, the penalty of power is 
responsibility. These three — work, duty, responsi- 
bility — are tonight yours in large measure. It may 
seem that the lines in which I have broadly forecast the 
future are a dream. It is a dream that the touch of gold 
would quickly make real; and far less a dream than the 
reality would seem tonight, could those old scholars look 
upon this scene and the city in which it is set. The 
history of Salem wealth gives every warrant that we 



THE SALEM ATHENAEUM 367 

should believe that the springs of public spirit will not 
dry up in the life and work of this and later generations, 
that the civic ideal will yet find its wisely self-denying 
servants whose perennial gifts have in this city assuaged 
the eternal inward strife of society and brought nearer 
that social justice I began by speaking of, which shall 
secure to all her citizens an equal ownership in the accu- 
mulated civilizing power of the state, which seems to me 
in the present stage of our world the rational end of 
democracy, as a political idea. It is in this spirit that 
in our hearts, if not in formal words, we dedicate this 
house to be a home of the intellectual life, and a hearth 
of the fine traditions of Salem; and we see, if dimly, yet 
clearer than our fathers saw, the face of the noble city 
that in time shall be — the Puritan city accomplished 
in its own ideal. 



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